April 7, 2008
South Africa’s Stake in Zimbabwe
In some ways I can sympathise with Thabo Mbeki’s reluctance to throw South Africa’s weight behind a campaign to shove Robert Mugabe out of power in Zimbabwe. The South Africans sometimes complain that the world should understand that Zimbabwe is not a colony of South Africa - which is true enough. Its also true - unfortunately - that there is considerable sympathy for Mugabe among black South Africans. Any South African politician has to take that into account.
But the South Africans should realise that they have a lot at stake in Zimbabwe - and I’m not just talking about the threat of refugee flows and chaos on their borders. Gordon Brown was probably too polite to put it this way when he met President Mbeki, but many people wonder whether - when they look at Zimbabwe - they are looking at a vision of South Africa in 30 years time. Zimbabwe looks like a vindication of every white racist prediction made at the time of independence, that African self-government would end in disaster. It is urgently in South Africa’s interests to help turn the country round.
That is all the more the case when South Africa’s own problems look like they are mounting. The prospect of President Jacob Zuma is not going down well overseas. Crime is still terrible. White flight continues. And now there are daily electricity cuts. One government source has even suggested that foreign investors delay investing for a few years, since the country could not handle the extra power demand new investment would create. As a frustrated South African puts it: “That is shooting a gift horse in the head.”
If Mbeki could help to get Mugabe out, he would be doing his country a favour in more ways than one.
Gideon,
Your recent posts rightly show the critical importance of Zimbabwe currently, and it is certainly interesting to try to make some understanding of Mugabe.
To this end, Gabriel García Márquez’s dictator in Autumn of the Patriarch reminds us that all mechanisms of state are ultimately human and, at some grotesque point within despotism, our political sense becomes useless to our understanding; we must here revert to our human understanding.
I think in some ways Márquez’s tyrant has even more of Mugabe than of Pinochet - any in case, I would strongly recommend it as ‘background music’ to the current situation.
Posted by: Justin | April 7th, 2008 at 10:39 am | Report this commentSo, what are you saying Mr. Rachman?
With all the polite, Cambridge-educated atrfulness, aren’t you essentially saying:
“Blacks can’t be trusted to run their own affairs and would be better off with crumbs falling off the table of the white masters, rather than getting no cumbs at all, on their own?”
Maybe you would like to opine eruditely on some of the following:
- Was colonialism good for the colonised? (The idea of the White man’s burden, appears to have deeper cultural and psychological roots in the West than people realise).
- Is it correct to use the past tense about colonialism in most of Africa? (Aren’t the flags and the palaces essentially a facade and the economies still dominated by the Western companies who give a cut to the corrupt elites in the same way as the 19th century colonialists cut deals with the headmen of the tribes to get at the gold, ivory and diamonds?)
- Is it sufficient to cite the example of the corrupt, brutal anti-Western Mugabe in support of your argument whilst overlooking many other corrupt, brutal thugs elsewhere who work hand in glove with the West?
- Is an African leader like Mbeki only correct if he acts in the ways that the Westerners approve of, to the exclusion of his own political base which, as you point out, has considerable sympathy for Mr. Mugabe?
(Would you, for example, have a realistic expectation of an American president putting Israel in its place?)
All the best,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | April 7th, 2008 at 11:35 am | Report this commentInteresting to speculate how Africa will be viewed in 100 years’ time. I don’t think much will have changed politically — if it did not happen in the first post-independence decades, then why should it transpire later on? Unless the Chinese will have set-up by then a string of well-governed client states, a form of post-modern colonialism.
P, Israel does not need to be “put in its place”, Iran does. Unfortunately, there is little prospect that an American president will be capable of doing so.
Posted by: RCS | April 7th, 2008 at 12:31 pm | Report this commentIf there is any white racism involved in attitudes toward Zimbabwe (and South Africa) it is in minimizing the significance of the humanitarian catastrophe in the former country caused by Mugabe’s iron-fisted rule. When virtually the entire population, except for Mugabe’s inner circle, lacks the necessities of life because of the way that the economy has been run into the ground, it is not farfetched to begin to draw comparisons with 1990’s Rwanda or present day Darfur. But, since Zimbabwe has no oil or geopolitical significance, no one seems to care.
Few people, however, have more to answer for to their own consciences and to the conscience of humanity in general than South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki. His latest reported pronouncement (in today’s FT) that the situation in Zimbabwe looks “hopeful” is accurate only from the standpoint of Mugabe supporters who want to stay in power at all costs, no matter how much misery they inflict on the rest of that country’s long suffering population. One would like to think that Mbeki does not speak for all South Africans, any more than he did when he was actively sabotaging efforts to deal with the AIDS crisis in his country. Certainly, there may be some sympathy for Mugabe in South Africa. But there must also be a good deal for the plight of the refugees from Zimbabwe who are also fleeing across the South African border. At least one would hope so.
Posted by: algasema | April 7th, 2008 at 2:02 pm | Report this comment@ Pacifist…
I hear you. A loud and long echo from this end….
Algasema is the personification of an aerodynamically perfect finger pointing at Black incompetence yet exonerating the continued role that Britain especially in the case of Zimbabwe has had continues to do directly and indirectly…
Mugabe should take the lion s share of blame, yes, but Britain is the lions mother and has reared its cub on a diet of hateful, self-serving policies designed to promulgate the UDI’s of this world…
The sins of the father…
Fotunately, even the rural folk of Zimbabwe are wisening up to the impact of government on their livelihood and I suspect Zimbabwe’s next political chapter will be so much more transparent and accountable… ironically - thanks largely to Mugabe who has inadvertently switched on the public consciousness to politics and the role of democracy in Africa.
Posted by: Karl Effenbergsson | April 7th, 2008 at 2:31 pm | Report this commentWell,Morgan Tsvangirai is in South Africa as he is seeking not only their help but international intervention…South Africa can’t do this alone…SOMEONE must be able to have influence with Mugaba!…he needs to be told he can keep his stolen millions he has squirreled away and some country offer him sanctuary.. and just GO!…otherwise face likely humiliation down the line after instilling yet more chaos, he needs to be told no one will remmber his early days,only the ending!…Tavangirai’s rise and growing clout under so much corruption and oppression by Mugabe shows there is a viable opposition …the rest of the world must NOT allow Mugabe to brutally crush it…
Posted by: Lisa-Helene Lawson | April 7th, 2008 at 4:40 pm | Report this commentFor decades, almost centuries, of Colonial Empire Rhodesia was not just a Dictatorship (and the Dictator was British) but a racist Dictatorship.
Curious how British use “Democracy” when they need it and forget about it when they don´t need it. The British Empire was a Dictatorship over hundreds of millions of people around the World, first of all India (compared to British invasion of India Hitler´s invasion of France was peanuts)
Even more intersting when we watch Hong Kong. Won after a Drug War in which British owned and supported the Drug Cartel (compared to British Drug Trade Pablo Escobar was peanuts) elected Government just came after more than a century, a couple of years before leaving in 1997. Until that moment, Democracy was not important…then suddenly came in a hurry.
Mugabe is an old incompetent even if he has a lot of support inside Zimbawe because nobody can stay in Government for decades without support and more when both the US and the UK are against. Probably there are more material reasons for that continuous British hate against him.
Posted by: Enrique | April 7th, 2008 at 6:36 pm | Report this commentKarl Effenbergsson, I am not aware of having said a single word in any of my posts on this subject about alleged “black incompetence”. I merely referred to two specific African leaders, namely Robert Mugabe, who rules by lies and intimidation directed against his own poeople, and Thabo Mbeki, who shows none of the courage or willingness to speak out against oppression by a black dictaror in neigboring Zimbabwe that his predecessor, Nelson Mandela, one of the greatest men alive today, if not of all time, did in opposing apartheid. Destroying an entire country and society is equally reprehensible regardless of the color of the tyrant who attempts to do so.
I cannot understand the reason for all the Britain bashing in your posts either. Certainly, Britain has an unenviable colonial record. But are the Mugabe thugs who are intimidating voters, rigging elections, ruining the economy, and stealing the land (not from whites, but from fellow black genuine war veterans - see today’s FT) British?
Posted by: algasema | April 7th, 2008 at 6:38 pm | Report this commentI meant “dictator”, not “dictaror”, above.
Posted by: algasema | April 7th, 2008 at 6:42 pm | Report this commentI also misspelled “neighboring”. Apologies.
Posted by: algasema | April 7th, 2008 at 6:44 pm | Report this commentYou misspelled twice: you meant “neighbouring”.
Posted by: RCS | April 7th, 2008 at 7:09 pm | Report this commentThank you for the correction, RCS, but the American poet, Robert Frost, famously wrote “Good fences make good neighbors”. Since I also happen to be an American, albeit one without any pretensions to literary talent, I will not try to improve on his spelling, which is standard on this side of the Atlantic. I hope that this brief comment, at least, has no spelling mistakes.
Posted by: algasema | April 7th, 2008 at 9:21 pm | Report this commentWell, alg, I hold with those who favour “neighbour”…but if it had to be written twice…”neighbor” is also great and would suffice.
Posted by: RCS | April 7th, 2008 at 10:34 pm | Report this commentThe position of Pacifist, Karl, and Enrique really surprises me. Their suggestion seems to be that Africans are inherently incapable of cleaning up the mess they are presently in (it is this cleaning up, after all, that Mr Rachman urges) - that such cleaning up cannot be achieved without Western intervention (the termination of allegedly presently continuing colonialism and whatnot).
And, of course, from the latter two there is always the classic “present attrocities are okay because others comitted attrocities in the past”.
Posted by: Andrei Timoshenko | April 8th, 2008 at 12:40 pm | Report this commentDear Mr. Timoshenko,
Speaking only for myself, I am surprised at your interpretation of what I said.
In my humble opinion, Western governments’ interventions to “export” democracy and freedom are generally harmful to the people of the 3rd world as such interventions are generally hypocritial attempts to advance political and economic goals of the West, at the expense of the South.
The above seems diametrically opposite of what you thought I said, hence the necessity to write this missive.
All the best,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | April 8th, 2008 at 2:16 pm | Report this commentDear Mr. Timoshenko,
Speaking only for myself, I am surprised at your interpretation of what I said.
In my humble opinion, Western governments’ interventions to “export” democracy and freedom are generally harmful to the people of the 3rd world as such interventions are generally hypocritial attempts to advance political and economic goals of the West, at the expense of the South.
The above seems diametrically opposite of what you thought I said, hence the necessity to write this missive.
All the best,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | April 8th, 2008 at 2:18 pm | Report this commentRCS, thank you again for the helpful and “neighbourly” spelling comments. Fortunately for the ordinary people of Zimbabwe (and unlike the situation on the US-Mexican border) South Africa does not seem to have a large supply of fences on its border with Zimbabwe, so evidently Robert Frost’s dictum (which he quoted disapprovingly in his poem) does not apply in this situation, and at least some people have at least a temporary escape route.
However, as Gideon Rachman and others have suggested, the most neighbourly (or neighborly) action of all would be for South Africa to help push Mugabe out.
Posted by: algasema | April 8th, 2008 at 3:43 pm | Report this commentPacifist, whoever you are, you are so much more articulate than most things I have read on the subject.
@ Andrei, I take your point to a degree.
I will however add that it doesnt take even 28 years in power for a new government to correct underlying structural imbalance that would otherwise be in place ad infinitum were they not addressed.
Western democracy in its purest form, is not a one-size fits all, and those tennets take time to engender I’m afraid. That said, it evidently doesnt always work or listen to the people’s voice even in sunny Blighty. Noone is Britain bashing, I love Britain, but it is disingenous to infer that even beloved Britain with all her best intentions for ridding the world of its “evils” doesnt have a highly dodgy and unparalleled past in the evil stakes and that I’m afraid has a longtail, part of which we see manifested in policy towards the likes of Zimbabwe and so on…
I suspect that in the case of Zimbabwe, sometimes you have to accept that the old structural ghost has to be completely dismantled and then re-built. Its not a ideal scenario of course because meanwhile average or “lowly” joe suffers most…
That said, I think Pacifist says it best when he suggests, as I do, that too often
“…Western governments’ interventions to “export” democracy and freedom are generally harmful to the people of the 3rd world as such interventions are generally hypocritial attempts to advance political and economic goals of the West, at the expense of the South…”
Posted by: Karl Effenbergsson | April 8th, 2008 at 5:47 pm | Report this comment