'We are all Zimbabweans now' - a novel by James Kilgore

By James Kilgore - Research Scholar, Center for African Studies, University of Illinois, (Urbana-Champaign).

I began my career as a fiction writer in 2003 at the age of 57.  I guess you could say my entry into this world of the writer took place under special circumstances. At the time I was in a California prison, adjusting to a new way of life after spending 27 years as a fugitive. Most of that time I’d spent in southern Africa, working as an educator and helping my partner raise our children.  By 2003 all of that was becoming distant memories. To make matters worse, the  few bits and pieces of information I did get  about events in Zimbabwe were hardly cheering. From afar I was witnessing the descent of a country where I had spent most of the 1980s into political and economic chaos.

After awhile I began to realize what was happening in Zimbabwe was not only a struggle about land and political power, it was a struggle over history.  Two competing paradigms were vying for hegemony. Robert Mugabe and his inner circle were advancing what Professor Terence Ranger, would later term “patriotic history.”  This vision laid all problems of Zimbabwe past and present at the doorstep of British imperialismwith white Rhodesians occupying a special category of surrogate oppressor.  Patriotic history constituted a unifying cry, an attempt to capture public memory and divert the attention of Zimbabweans from any authoritarianism, corruption, and divisions along ethnic or class lines. Patriotic history’s “them and us” clearly delineated the fault lines and papered over any curiosity aroused by  the memories of individuals who had suffered at the hands of the Fifth Brigade or those who quietly watched their children starve while political leaders drove by in their BMWs.

On the opposite pole, the seizure of white-owned farms by the Mugabe government  prompted a resurrection of colonialist history.  The few Western media reports I saw pictured beleaguered white farmers under attack by unrelenting, unreasoning Africans. These accounts typically portrayed whites as innocent victims in this process, a well-intentioned minority who had built up the country during Rhodesia days and subsequently joined hands with black compatriots in reconciliation after independence, only to be reviled and dispossessed.  Though I only heard of them peripherally, memoirs by white Zimbabweans/Rhodesians soon burst forth to revive the myths of the past. . (Buckle, 2001 and 2006; Hunter et al. 2001; Harrison 2006) Like its patriotic counterpart, this resurgent white supremacist history involved simplifying and omitting.  Blights on the days of white rule such as the migrant labor system, black disenfranchisement, expropriation of African lands conveniently disappeared. Eric Harrison, on a website named after his memoir Jambanja, encapsulated this view neatly in his description of post-1980 Zimbabwe:

Tyranny replaced the democratic process.  National self-sufficiency gave way to drastic shortages and malnutrition.  Through all this sorry history one thing stood out – the indomitable spirit of the white and black Zimbabweans who were the victims of this insanity. (2010)

As a person in prison and as an historian dual urges struck me. The first was to in some way connect to events in Zimbabwe. On a personal level, this was an effort to transcend my incarceration, to link not only with the place and events, but with the people in this hour of conflict and confusion. Writing would shorten the psychological and historical distance between myself and southern Africa, where the bulk of my family, friends, and personal emotions resided.

Linked to this was the second urge, perhaps more fantastical: to make some kind of meaningful intervention into what was taking place in Zimbabwe. Given my situation, such aspirations seemed almost laughable. The bulk of the political struggles were being fought on the ground, one place I definitely could not be. However, the struggle over history involved, at least to some extent, a war of words. On that battle front, I was in good shape. I had a lot of time to produce words. Certainly I wouldn’t have the last word, but something I wrote might just trigger one or two thoughts in someone far away. For an imprisoned writer, that’s grabbing the gold. Besides, even if my words never reached anyone, the act of writing would help me to put my own thoughts about Zimbabwe in order. I decided to write an historical novel.

Of course I had one big problem in this endeavour-I’d never written a novel before. My one foray into fiction was a short story published in a community magazine in Melbourne, Australia some two decades earlier. Fortunately, to my knowledge, no copies of that feeble effort had survived.

As a novice fiction writer I not only had to create a story, I had to invent a writing process. At the time I started constructing the text, I really had no idea about the details of plot, setting, character, and all the other things they teach people in writing and literature classes. I was flailing in the darkness. When I look back on it, I really don’t see how I ever managed to produce a novel in such ridiculous circumstances, but I did. So let me describe how it happened. I’ll start with a plot summary, then look at how I tied together the historical paradigms that concerned me with the story I wanted to tell. After that I’ll outline how I actually developed the ability to write what became We Are All Zimbabweans Now.

Plot Summary

The story takes place in early 1980s Zimbabwe, right after independence.  The protagonist Ben Dabney, a young American post-graduate student in History, travels to Zimbabwe with a totally idealized picture of Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwean notion of reconciliation. Ben sees Mugabe as the embodiment of the spirit of Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, a logical candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. As an historian, Ben aims to tell the story of the Zimbabwean miracle of reconciliation to the world.

Obviously this is going to be story of disillusionment. Ben wends his way through a romance with an ex-freedom fighter, a conflict with the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland and harassment from the C.I.O. when he tries to investigate the death of Elias Tichasara, a ZANLA guerrilla leader who died in an unexplained car accident right before independence.  In the end Ben abandons his project of writing praise poetry for Mugabe and re-works his approach toward history and ultimately life itself. That’s it in a nutshell.

Now let me explain how I put it together.

Developing An Approach to the History

My first priority was linking my approach to history with the story. Many writers of historical fiction ignore notions of approach or paradigm, often seeing a hard divide between history and historical fiction.  Author William Martin, for example, argues that:

The historian serves the truth of his subject. The novelist serves the truth of his tale.  (2010)

Guy Vanderhaeghe concurs:

To what do I owe my primary allegiance? The demands of history or the demands of the novel? In the end, I clearly opted for what I felt was necessary to ensure the artistic integrity of the novel. I entered the camp of Mark Twain who said, ‘First get your facts. Then do with them what you will.’ I decided the noun novel was more important than the adjective historical. (2005)

For many such writers, the goal is to achieve what is alternatively referred to as authenticity, believability, or verisimilitude.  The key to all this rests primarily in the details of setting. While lawyers, politicians and business leaders often proclaim that the devil is in the details, Vanderhaeghe  offers a totally different slant:

As a writer of fiction I live and breathe minutiae, quirky odds and ends of information. For a novelist, it is not the devil that is found in the details. The details are where God resides. A novel cries out for texture to lend it verisimilitude. (2005)

In this same paper, Vanderhaeghe goes on to argue that writing historical fiction somehow liberates a writer from the shackles of academic rigor. As he put it: “the lack of evidence provided me with freedom.”

Hence, the reflections of writers of historical fiction often dwell on quests for the obscure, the hunt for memoirs which detail the color and textures of the curtains in the living room or describe how to make a jug of mead.  While I spent considerable time doing such research myself, (which I will discuss below), the authenticity of my story didn’t revolve around such details.  Rather, the believability of this tale would ultimately hinge on my ability to recreate the political and historical landscape of Zimbabwe in the 1980s. First of all this required me deciding what I actually made of that history, where I stood on the debates and interpretations of Zimbabwean history in the 1980s and how that linked to my project of writing a novel in the early 2000s.

Doing this from thousands of miles away in the absence of access to the Internet or a library, meant relying on a few books sent in and tapping into my own knowledge and experience in an effective way.  I began by reconstructing the evolution in my own thinking about Zimbabwean history. I harkened back to 1983 when I was teaching Form 2 History at Harare’s Mabvuku High School.  The Ministry of Education had just scrapped the Rhodesian syllabus and inserted a new nationalist curriculum in its place. The problem was, at that time there were no textbooks or support materials available. We had to create our own. To teach the first Chimurenga/Umvukela, I secured a copy of Terence Ranger’s Revolt in Southern Rhodesia. I spent many hours pouring over the ins and outs of Kaguvi, Nehanda, and  Mukwati, preparing detailed notes for my students which I then transferred to printed sheets via the mimeograph machine in the hallway outside the Headmaster’s office.

This was the starting point of my engagement with nationalist historiography-the idea that the colonized were not mere passive victims in the process of colonialism but rightfully resisted. What a great leap forward this was from the leftover Rhodesian  textbooks, The Patterns of History, which propagated notions like blacks being better suited for slavery because dark skins could endure the hot sun.

The nationalist historiography helped to unearth pockets of African resistance in all corners of colonial society and demonstrated how the struggle for independence was a long, slow, uneven but inevitable process.  The insights of nationalism, combined with my reading of Marxist political economy, guided me through my teaching and writing in the 1980s. This culminated in contributing a number of chapters to  what became the most popular O level textbook  in the country, People Making History (1991 and 1994), a book that, perhaps regrettably,  is still sold today.

Fortunately, my own evolution did not stop there. For while the nationalist historiography and Marxist political economy shed light on significant aspects of colonial and post-independence history, they also cast some rather malevolent shadows. In particular, the infatuation with the success and moral authority of the armed struggle made many of us too quick to rise to the defense of Mugabe and his inner circle.  Most tragically, the light of nationalist inspiration blinded me and a large swath of people in Zimbabwe at the time (including historians) to the scale and significance of the military offensives by the Zimbabwean government forces in Matabeleland during the 1980s. We heard reports of slaughter and repression from people who lived in Matabeleland. We believed those tales but from our intellectual comfort zone the violence in Matabeleland remained a minor blemish on a glorious movement, something akin to the Nhari rebellion or the assassination of Herbert Chitepo.  We were also certain (hopeful in fact) that the bulk of “dissident” activity was instigated by the apartheid regime. We still wanted to deny that ethnicity or regionalism could play a significant role in an obviously successful nationalist project. It took a long time to shake the foundations of that belief.

Ultimately  my discontent with this nationalist paradigm went beyond giving Gukurahundi and all its ramifications a rightful place in history.  There were class and gender issues which nationalist historiography also skimmed over. Nationalist-oriented historians focused on the political realm at the highest levels-party structures and position papers, rivalries and intrigues within organizations, and post-independence twists and turns in policy and personnel.  My experience with domestic workers, both as a teacher in an evening school as well as in my research, brought my lens down to a lower level.  I adopted a “history from below” perspective, one which I saw at that time as a deepening of, rather than a rejection of the nationalist approach.  While I remained within the nationalist paradigm, looking at post-independence Zimbabwe from below prompted me to ask some bigger questions, particularly which classes benefited from the ZANU-led government and why.

Furthermore, nationalist historiography and histories of nationalism generally had a woeful record when it came to gender issues.  Much of nationalist practice and history kept women in the background.  Party political positions defended womens’ equality but actions reflected something very different.  My research into domestic workers led me to engage with another aspect of history from below, the gendered nature of Zimbabwean society and the experience of working class and rural women.

In addition to the above issues further consideration of nationalist historiography brought out critiques with regard to issues of ethnicity, spirituality/ religion, urban-rural divides, the implications of political violence as a strategy for liberation and the nature of democracy. Somehow I needed to draw all these threads together and weave them into a story.

I was determined that a reader of my work would neither conclude that Robert Mugabe was a saintly savior of the African people nor that whites in pre- and post-1980 Zimbabwe were uniformly champions of peace and racial equality.  But I had to complicate things much further while reminding myself that there were aspects of the nationalist historiography such as the emphasis on political economy and race which I could not cast completely aside.

In the midst of juggling the complexities of all this, a further complicator arrived one day at mail call,  Luise White’s book The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo (2003). Her work tore apart notions of absolute historical truth in Zimbabwe, freeing me from the idea that all history must be knowable, that circumstances could never overwhelm the intrepid researcher in a quest for truth. White reminded me that history was not a murder mystery to be solved but rather a set of questions to pursue, guided by a curiosity and at times a desire to be surprised by what you find rather than to simply uncover more evidence which already substantiates what you “know.”

This morass of ideas continually raced through my head as I lay on various prison bunks or stood in line for trays of goulash in penitentiaries in places like Lompoc, Tracy and Susanville. But without the time for reflection with which prison authorities were kind enough to provide me, I would never have been able to complicate Zimbabwean history enough to write a novel with any measure of authenticity. In my mind, no historical fiction could carry much weight if the writer wasn’t as concerned with the interpretations and debates of the history, indeed the politics of the history, as in the vitality of the story. My allegiance was as much to history as to the novel. History in this instance was not only the facts, but how historical theories, interpretations, and debates enter the political arena.

Truth v. Fiction: What to Fictionalize

The second issue I had to address was the question of fictionalizing versus telling the whole truth. The spectrum of historical fiction ranges from acute realism to magical realism to alternate history to historical fantasy- from tracing every little fact and detail in precision to making it all up.

As an academic historian of sorts and a history teacher, it’s not surprising that I fell on the realist end of the spectrum, especially since I chose to write about events that took place in Zimbabwe at a time I lived there.  Making use of my own experiences seemed to be a vital contribution to the authenticity of my work.

However, since this exercise would inevitably rely heavily on my memory of events rather than historians’ accounts, I decided to fictionalize all the characters who actually appear in the story with the exception of Robert Mugabe. “Bob” just had to be there.

This wasn’t simply a creative choice. In the absence of access to sources, I wasn’t confident I could gather the necessary details of the lives of people like Eddson Zvobgo, Enos Nkala or Joyce Mujuru to avoid major errors of fact.

Of course there were some grey areas in terms of fictionalization. A number of the characters in We Are All Zimbabweans Now bear quite close resemblance to real people. The most obvious example would be Elias Tichasara, a liberation fighter whose untimely death in a car accident looks a lot like Josiah Tongogara’s.  I chose to fictionalize him simply because his totally fictionalized son and former lover were central characters in my plot. From where I was I had no idea if there was a Josiah Tongogara, Jr. or even an ex-partner of Tongogara’s who had his child. Rather than run the risk of slandering such people if they existed, I chose to fictionalize the character, perhaps at the loss of some authenticity.

Many other characters are amalgamations.  For instance, the somewhat Zvobgoesque Pius Manyeche ultimately had a Maurice Nyagumbo ending. And some of Ben’s confrontations with local culture, like kneeling down to a Shona-speaking woman, are incidents which actually occurred to people that I knew in Zimbabwe in this period.  At times, my line between fiction and true history was quite fine.

However, relying on so many fictitious characters meant paying attention to the accuracy of other elements of the novel. Other than trying to ensure a factual accuracy about events of the period, I also spent considerable time trying to re-create the sensory context so important for a work of fiction. My God wasn’t in the details but I couldn’t neglect those details either. I didn’t want to fictionalize sadza into pasta or Tanganda Tea into Twinings.  I spent hours making up what writers call a “sensory diary”, a listing of things I saw, heard, smelled, tasted or touched during my time in Zimbabwe. This list was greatly enhanced by the opportunity to read novels by Shimmer Chinodya (1989) and Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988), as well as the brilliant collection of interviews, Mothers of the Revolution by Irene Staunton (1991).

This prompted some serious self-reflection. How much had my own perception and analysis of events altered my own memory of them over the years? Could I trust myself as a source? How could I verify my own memories given the limitations of my status of incarceration?

For example, I was convinced that I could still accurately recall the coating that roasted matumbu left on the roof of my mouth and that a sip of cold Castle would wash it away. I was also fairly sure that rural bus conductors used to walk around on the top of moving buses but I couldn’t exactly recall an incident of this taking place. From a California prison cell, I couldn’t test such hypotheses. I chose to accept them as authentic, though I could not verify their absolute “truth.”

Historical Debate as Plot Device

In the first draft of We Are All Zimbabweans Now, Ben Dabney wasn’t an historian. Then I read The DaVinci Code. While many criticisms can be made of Dan Brown’s work, The DaVinci Code very effectively demonstrated the connections between the power to write and propagate history and the actual wielding of political power. Ultimately the journey of Brown’s protagonist was a quest to unpack the forces that lurked behind popular perceptions of the church and religious history. I believed Zimbabwean history held at least as many controversies and intrigues as the history of the church, so I sought to write a novel that would unpack a few of them. Hopefully, though, I didn’t make up quite as many events and historical forces as Dan Brown did.

Historical debate enters the plot thread of We Are All Zimbabweans Now via Ben. He is an historian who begins with a project of writing the story of his hero, Robert Mugabe. At this point Ben sits squarely in the “great man” school of history, albeit with a nationalist slant. However, shortly into his research, Ben’s very supportive supervisor leaves and a Professor  Latham takes over.  Latham is a Briton who longs for the glory days of the empire. Latham threatens to pull the plug on Ben’s funding unless he interviews more whites from the previous government.  The sets off the debate inside the historian part of Ben’s mind.

Then the ZANU ruling circles try to woo Ben. Cabinet ministers welcome his project, promise him the red carpet treatment including an interview with Mugabe if he follows their recommended path. They are lining him up to write what likely would have been the “patriotic” history of that time.

Next  Ben meets a young British woman historian  at the archives. They enter a short, stormy affair where Ben momentarily becomes a part of a cynical expatriate circle, those who are revolted by the racist attitudes of local whites but denigrate any expectation that a Mugabe-led government can do much better. They push Ben toward yet a third historian’s role, that of distant, comfortable expatriate eating roast beef dinners served by domestic workers, bemoaning the lack of a good red wine in the shops, and writing obscure, self-serving  tomes about minutiae.

Finally, through various sets of circumstances, Ben moves out of these circles and travels to the high density areas, then to rural Zimbabwe. His discussions with Marxist guerrilla-turned-agricultural co-op chairperson, Wonder  Chitiyo, alert Ben to a hidden history, the story of what took place in the past and what continues to go on in the fields and working class urban areas of Zimbabwe, the places where the majority of the population lives.

Ben’s journey as an historian unfolds as he tries to sort out which path to follow. In the course of his explorations, he stumbles into the violence in Matabeleland and another side of hidden history emerges. When he tries to bring the violence into the public light, he runs up against the authorities.

Throughout the book I have attempted to portray this historical debate not only through Ben’s experience but in his internal monolog as well. Unlike Dan Brown’s characters, Ben is an historian. He can use the terminology of history to frame the discourse of the monkeys that chatter away in his head.

These contestations over history surface in the title of the book as well. Ben first hears the phrase “we are all Zimbabweans now” from an elderly working class gentleman in a café where Ben is the only white person. As Ben takes his food from the counter and looks for a place to sit, the old man slides out a chair at his table and offers it to Ben, saying, “take a seat, we are all Zimbabweans Now.” In this instance, the phrase is inclusive, reflecting a new attitude where blacks and whites can sit together at the same table in a way they weren’t able to do before independence..

By the end of the book, Robert Mugabe has appropriated the phrase and it embodies a new politics.  When he says “we are all Zimbabweans now”, he means that everyone must come under the hegemony of one party – ZANU. To be Zimbabwean is to be ZANU. To be outside the party or critical of the party is to be something other than Zimbabwean. Expropriating the expressions of ordinary people and using them to express the political project of a ruling party is part of the process of re-writing history- akin to dubbing the farm seizures the Third Chimurenga or labeling MDC members dissidents.  The power to write history, is also the power to create the discourse which is used to convey that history.

Putting It All Together

Weaving all of these processes into a work of fiction was a lengthy learning process. Not only did I have to worry about notions of history but I had to build my own capacity to inject all of this into a novel. In the absence of mentors or literature classes, I relied primarily on getting invaluable feedback on various drafts from friends and reading a lot of how-to books about fiction writing- how to develop a plot, how to build characters, how to write dialogue, etc.

Ultimately my novel went through probably half a dozen drafts. I completed the first attempt on a forty year old manual typewriter with a fading ribbon. Then I moved to another prison and struck it rich gaining access to a computer with a hard drive and a printer. I was able to print out my work and read it back to myself in my cell late at night while everyone else slept. By the time I was ready to produce the final product, I had moved again and lost all access to technology. I had to rely on pen and paper to write out 570 pages of semi-legible scribbles which a number of my dear friends and family typed onto a computer and sent to the publisher. Imagine my joy a few weeks later when my wife told me during a phone call that We Are All Zimbabweans Now had been accepted by Umuzi Publishers in Cape Town.

Though my writing process was quite atypical, I wonder whether my research process was truly impoverished. Certainly at a technological level, I took a step back in history to the pre-Internet era.  Also, my isolation from other scholars or even people with a rudimentary knowledge of Zimbabwe was clearly a handicap.  Yet, in some ways, incarceration  provided opportunities to reflect and analyze that few scholars and writers in the twenty first century experience. I had no meetings to attend , no deadlines to meet, no children to pick up, no email to check, no SMS messages waiting.  I’d never even seen an iPod or a smart phone.  I was “free” from such chains.  I’m not sure that I’m richer for this experience or that I will lock myself away in a room to engage in reflection for further works, but I’m also more certain than ever that there are many roads to the production of knowledge and the writing of novels and all of them are not paved with URLs and RSS feeds.

Rights reserved: Please credit the author, and Solidarity Peace Trust, as the original source for all material republished on other websites unless otherwise specified. Please provide a link back to http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org

This article can be cited in other publications as follows: Kilgore, J. (2012) ‘History and Fiction in the Writing of  ”We Are All Zimbabweans Now”‘, 4 May, Solidarity Peace Trust: http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/1175/the-writing-of-we-are-all-zimbabweans-now/

References

Barnes, T. et al. 1991. People Making History, Book 3.Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House.

________. 1993. People Making History, Book 4.Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House.

Brown, Dan. 2003. The DaVinci Code, New York: Double Day.

Buckle, C. 2001. African Tears: The Zimbabwe Land Invasions. London: Covos Day.

________. 2006. Beyond Tears: Zimbabwe’s Tragedy. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball.

Chinodya, Shimmer. 1989. Harvest of Thorns. Harare: Baobob.

Dangarembga, Tsitsi, Nervous Conditions,  (London :Womens’ Press, 1988)

Harrison, Eric, http://www.jambanja.net , retrieved  1 Feb, 2010;

Hunter, G  et al. 2001. Voices of Zimbabwe: The Pain, The Courage, The Hope. London: Cavos Day.

Martin, William. A Few Thoughts on Historical Fiction, (Accessed at:       http://web.utk.edu/~wrobinso/590_lec_hisfic.html, October 3, 2010)

Ranger, T. O. 1967,  Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896-7: A Study in African Resistance. London: Heinneman.

Staunton, Irene. 1991. Mothers of the Revolution: The War Experiences of Thirty Zimbabwean Women, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Vanderleaghe, Guy, 2005.“Writing History vs. Writing the Historical Novel’, A Talk Presented to the Montana Historical Society, October 2.  Helena, Montana. U.S.A

Zimbabwe’s years of economic mismanagement and political instability, especially in the last decade of the Zimbabwe Crisis, have had catastrophic effects on the national economy, much of which has left many of its once-vibrant sectors and industries significantly depleted (Kamidza 2009: 6). The formation of the GNU has since brought some stability to the economy, particularly through the implementation of the Short Term Emergency Recovery Programme that helped reduce rapid inflation levels as well as ensure the provision of basic commodities (though largely imported) that were scarce before. However, despite these improvements, many vital sectors such as health and education are still functioning well below their optimum capacity (Nkomo 2011). As a result, Zimbabwe continues to hang in the balance and the current government is struggling to develop sustainable policy alternatives to address the problems and challenges of the past.

For the country to move forward, Zimbabweans will need to harness their collective energy to rebuild Zimbabwe. Because of its close links to the people and the communities, Zimbabwe’s civil society, in particular, has an important role in mobilising communities for the sustainable economic reconstruction and development of the country. Currently, Zimbabwe’s civil society sector has not done much to mobilise Zimbabweans for the social and economic reconstruction of the country. There are two main reasons for this; firstly, due to their extensive focus on political advocacy at the expense of economic and social advocacy and secondly, due to the underdeveloped nature of Zimbabwean civil society resulting from years of state repression and the economic crisis that eroded the organisational capacity of civics. This paper discusses the various strategies that can be adopted by civics to mobilize communities for Zimbabwe’s national reconstruction and sustainable development

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Rights reserved: Please credit the author, and Solidarity Peace Trust, as the original source for all material republished on other websites unless otherwise specified. Please provide a link back to http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org

This article can be cited in other publications as follows: Zigomo, K. (2012) ‘A Community-Based Approach to Sustainable Development: The Role of Civil Society in Rebuilding Zimbabwe’, 2 April, Solidarity Peace Trust: http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/1159/community-based-approach-to-sustainable-development/

On the other hand the countries of the West, through an increasingly problematic sanctions regime, have added to the political gridlock in Zimbabwe in the guise of being the arbiters of global human rights. In the face of the inconsistencies in the application of the ‘right to protect’ by the Atlantic emporium in contemporary global politics, this potentially noble project is in danger of being cast as yet another form of imperial arrogance.

At present the rush to elections by a beleaguered party of liberation must be set against this broader context, and the dangers that a rapid descent into a plebiscite are likely to bring upon Zimbabwean citizens. In a useful article in the Zimbabwe Independent 17^th February 2012 (‘Zimbabwe: Elections in 2012 or GPA/GNU 11’), Ibbo Mandaza clearly spelt out the current dangers in rushing to the polls, pointing in particular to the persistent economic problems that marked the debacle of 2008, and the narrow interests of sections of the securocratic elite. My concern in this discussion will focus more on the regional and international dimensions of the current political challenges.

Since late last year the SADC mediation lost some momentum as the facilitator, President Zuma and his team were caught up in the internal problems of the ANC, the centenary celebrations of the South African ruling party, and the machinations of the election over the new head of the African Union. Thus the momentum and promise built up by the more critical position taken towards Zanu PF at the SADC summit in Livingstone in March 2011, lost some of its force as the year wore on. The intended meeting between the facilitator and the GPA Principals to discuss outstanding issues of the agreement has yet to take place, and the lull in the mediation has spurred Mugabe and those in Zanu PF keen on an early election, into renewed pressure for such an event.

It is therefore imperative for SADC to maintain their current stand on the implementation of the GPA before elections, as the regional body remains the major force with the diplomatic muscle to block the destructive rush to an election that the country is not prepared for. A key part of the Mbeki mediation from 2007 was that the Zimbabwean political parties and SADC retain control of the mediation process. In this regards he proposed that the ‘principal task of the international community is to encourage and support the united effort of the people of Zimbabwe and leaders of Zimbabwe and to find a solution to their problems, at all costs avoiding any temptation to divide these people and leaders, regardless of the ways and means that might be used to foment such division.’

This basic proposition has continued to guide the Zuma mediation and the current SADC position. However it is imperative that the regional body ensures that the fight to protect the sovereignty of the region from destructive outside interference is matched by an equal determination to ensure the protection of the democratic and human rights in each of the countries in the region. This balance of imperatives was not always apparent in the Mbeki mediation, notwithstanding his important role in pushing the mediation through in Zimbabwe, and SADC has yet to ensure this dual mandate in the country. Pressure on SADC must be maintained to add new momentum to the facilitation process and ensure that the fatigue with the Zimbabwe problem inside the regional body does not lead to its willingness to accept minimal electoral conditions that do not meet the conditions set out in the GPA.

Another problematic factor in the Zimbabwe equation is the current role of the EU and the US. From the beginning of the mediation both these bodies were at best skeptical of the process and at worst cynical about its outcomes. Once the GPA was signed there was a largely luke warm response to the agreement, marked by a combination of humanitarian assistance and the continued use of the sanctions or targeted measures imposed in the early 2000’s, to influence the outcome of the process, contrary to the content of the agreement and the official positions of the signatories of the parties and guarantors of the agreement. What could have been a moment at which the sanctions were, at least suspended as the basis for a broader political re-engagement, provided the pretext for a persistent contestation, and the lack of consensus between African and Western countries on this issue. Thus unlike the Kenyan agreement, negotiated by Koffi Annan with the full support of the Western countries, the Zimbabwean GPA has been bogged down by the continuing dispute between SADC, and the West over the implementation of the GPA.

Recently two important initiatives have attempted to move the debate on sanctions forward. Firstly a report by the International Crisis Group on the 6 February 2012 broadly advocated, amongst other recommendations, for a combination of a comprehensive review of the targeted measures and greater flexibility in its implementation, with the continued use of sanctions as a strategy. Similarly on the 17^th February the EU, in order to ‘encourage further progress in the implementation of the GPA,’ removed 51 individuals and 20 ‘entities’ from the visa ban and asset freeze list, while also keeping the rest of the sanctions in place. The central problem with the approach taken by both these initiatives is that while there is an implicit recognition that pressure from the sanctions has not produced the broader political changes they had intended, and become counter-productive in the context of the GPA, the use of the sanctions remains a central part of the diplomatic approach of the Western countries towards the continuing problems of the GPA. This approach has been at odds with both the GPA and the SADC position, and ensured a persistent dissonance in the position of the regional body and the West over the matter. The major benefactor of this disagreement has been Zanu PF which has since 2009 wielded the sanctions issue as another example of the West’s paternalist approach to African initiatives. In the broader context of the AU’s marginalization in Libya and the Ivory Coast, this message has resonated strongly in the region.

It is instructive to compare the current period in Zimbabwean politics with that leading up to the Lancaster House agreement. One of the major factors that determined the transition to independence in 1980 was the convergence of pressures on the national forces from regional and international players in the ‘Rhodesian Question’ in the late 1970’s. These included: the pressure from the South African Government on the Smith regime for a settlement in the context of the Apartheid regime’s reformulation of its strategic interests at this time; the influence of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Lusaka in August 1979 in pushing the Thatcher government into not accepting the Internal Settlement and instead agreeing to a constitutional conference of all the major parties; and the decisive position of Front Line States and the Cuban Government in persuading the Patriotic Front to attend the Lancaster House Conference.

In the present context there is a much weaker alignment of regional and international forces. In particular there is a lack of a strong consensus between SADC and the Western countries, while the Commonwealth is no longer a key factor in the Zimbabwe negotiations. This lack of aligned pressure has allowed greater space for the obstructive forces in Zanu PF to operate, and played an important role in Mugabe’s attempts to undermine the GPA and call for an early election. At this stage, notwithstanding the serious risks involved, it may prove a way forward for SADC, the EU and the US to agree to the following: Suspension of the sanctions on the basis of, and in recognition of, an agreed road map by the GPA partners, rather than waiting for a full implementation of the GPA; an agreement between the regional and international players that in the event of another failed election precipitated by the coercive forces in Zanu PF, the sanctions would be reintroduced with the support of SADC.

A continued stalemate over this issue is not likely to improve the prospects for a democratic transition in the country, and the growing concern on the continent over the West’s disregard for continental institutions is likely to strengthen Mugabe’s hand.

Please cite this article as follows: Raftopoulos, B. (2012) ‘SPT-Zimbabwe Update No.4. March 2012: The Shadow of Elections’, 9 March, Solidarity Peace Trust: http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/1150/spt-zimbabwe-update-no-4-june-2011-the-shadow-of-elections//

Paul Chizuze

A long established Zimbabwean human rights activist has been missing since 8 pm on Wednesday 8 February 2012.

Over the last three decades, Paul has been either employed by, or active with, the Legal Resources Foundation, Amani Trust Matabeleland, The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, ZimRights, Churches in Bulawayo, CivNet, and Masakhaneni Trust.

WHERE IS PAUL?

He allegedly left his home around 8 pm on 8^th February, and what happened after this remains a mystery.  He may have been murdered, hijacked or abducted by parties unknown.

His car, a white twin cab Nissan Hardbody Reg Number ACJ 3446 is also missing.

Paul has searched for other activists and never given up. We appeal to the police to pursue all the possibilities, and we in civics vow to maintain a campaign to find Paul wherever he may be.

• CHURCHES IN BULAWAYO
• GRACE TO HEAL
• LEGAL RESOURCES FOUNDATION
• MASAKHANENI TRUST
• RADIO DIALOGUE
• RESEARCH AND ADVOCACY UNIT
• ZIMBABWE HUMAN RIGHTS NGO FORUM
• ZIMBABWE CIVIC EDUCATION NETWORK TRUST
• ZIMBABWE LAWYERS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Viewing the broad spectrum of the political landscape in Zimbabwe at the end of 2011, one is left with the distinct impression that all the political forces are caught under a spell of  indecision. The dilemmas of leadership renewal, electoral strategy and a broad vision for the future are all inducing a sense of hesitancy, that in the case of Zanu PF, manifests itself in  renewed aggression and political hubris. Moreover if the Wikileaks reports have any validity this sense of uncertainty is not new, as all parties have, over the last decade,sought out the father confessor of the American Embassy to vent their fears and schizophrenic party psyches, none more so than the outwardly macho Zanu PF.

To start with Zanu PF, it is clear that the decision at the recent Bulawayo conference of the party to nominate Mugabe once again as the presidential candidate for the next election tells us a great deal about a party that is simply unable, at this stage, to visualise a regenerative strategy outside of its octogenarian leader. The lack of trust in an open discussion over the succession issue, is based on a  party that fears its own internal contradictions and history as much as it does the judgement of an open and fair plebiscite. Zanu PF is also a party that assumes that the Zimbabwean state is its private property and therefore finds it difficult to understand any other means to secure its ill- gotten gains except through the continued stranglehold over the military- security apparatus. For all these reasons and more Mugabe and his party remain the major obstacle to political progress in Zimbabwe. Yet Mugabe and his party are not about to disappear and their future, even if it may not be a long one for the President, must be a part of any longer term settlement in the country.

Tsvangirai’s MDC have their own set of doubts. A popularly elected party that was denied the fruits of victory, the party has had to confront the challenges of learning statecraft in an inclusive government with a ruthless, violent and wily ‘partner’. This challenge has had to be undertaken with a party apparatus that requires a huge amount of organisational strengthening and capacity building, and which has had its fair share of problems with internal accountability and intra-party violence. The recent personal problems of Morgan Tsvangirai have added to the leadership struggles that have also emerged in the MDC-T.

The smaller MDC formation led by Welshman Ncube faces an even greater sense of uncertainty about its future, as a result of an ongoing legal battle over the leadership,  continued defection of its membership, and the knowledge that its current survival depends on its capacity to manoeuvre between the two major parties. Added to this is the constant vilification that this formation and its leader have had to face from all sides in Zimbabwe.

For their part the regional and international players in Zimbabwean politics  confront their own uncertainties. After the more critical position taken on the Mugabe regime in Livingstone in March this year, SADC followed this up with resolutions in Sandton and Luanda that endorsed this position, even if in less critical language. However there has been a lull in the SA mediation in the last quarter of 2011 with President Zuma, confronted with his own set of problems in the ANC, slow to take up some key outstanding issues in the GPA. Foremost amongst these challenges is the problem of the role of the security sector in the next election. This is an issue that the negotiators have been unable to resolve and have therefore determined that the matter can only be taken up by Zuma and the Principals in Zimbabwe. Zuma’s hesitation around this issue echoes Mbeki’s unwillingness to deal with it in the discussions leading to the GPA, but it remains the central problem in the political equation.

SADC’s work has been made more difficult by its differences with the EU and the US over the continued sanctions policy of these countries, and the often mixed messages that have been sent out on this issue by the MDCs and the civic movement. For their part it appears that the EU, in particular, are aware of the limited and even counter-productive effects of the sanctions policy, but are more concerned about saving face with their own domestic constituencies, than with the problematic effects of this policy on the politics of the Inclusive Government. Moreover the global politics of human rights has too often been associated with a politics of regime change, making it difficult for human rights defenders in Zimbabwe to articulate this discourse in the face of nationalist pronouncements.

It is clear therefore that if there is indecision in Zimbabwean politics it is based on the growing complexity of the problem and the increasing need for a more assertive mediation process. In the current politics of Southern Africa this mediation can only be led effectively by SADC, with all its weaknesses, with both the EU and the US finding ways to strengthen rather than undermine this process. The central objective of the SADC mediation leading to the GPA was to establish the conditions for a free and fair election. That objective remains to be fulfilled and it is the processes leading to the next election, more than the timing of it, that are the most important factors to keep in focus.

A pregnant woman stands in her empty kitchen, rural Gwanda, October 2011. “No food, no work, no money. If only I could get cattle to help me plough.”

SPT Report

Nationally, Zimbabwe is more food secure at the end of 2011 than it has been for several years. However, parts of Zimbabwe suffered serious crop failure earlier this year and a million people are still predicted to need supplementary feeding. In Gwanda, Matabeleland South, the authors found that almost half of households indicated a day without food in the recent past.[1]  Only 17% of families reported eating three meals a day, meaning that 83% of households were, weeks before the onset of the official “hungry season in October”, already making food compromises daily. Grazing is critical, and people are traveling further to find water. This has been one of the hottest Octobers on record. Several families reported that baboons were killing and eating young goats and chickens, as the hunger now affects all living creatures in this area. Several families had no livestock left at all, not even one chicken.

Of concern by the end of October, is that supplementary feeding has not yet started, nor has the distribution of seed, yet the first rains have arrived. If people are to avoid yet another season of crop failure, there is an urgent need for free agricultural inputs to roll out now. Furthermore, many families are in desperate need of food now.

Deindustrialization in Bulawayo

This hunger – already so extreme ahead of the recognized “peak hunger season” that officially lasts from October to February – is taking place at a time when Bulawayo, traditionally the source of employment and resources for Matabeleland, has seen a cataclysmic loss of jobs in industry in the last two years. This means that part of the greater support system for rural Matabeleland is highly compromised. The report traces the recent economic history of the region, and efforts to regenerate industry.

Deportations

As deportations from South Africa gain momentum, the 17% of rural families that receive monthly remittances stand to lose this little extra means of support. All families with members in the diaspora will have extra mouths to feed during the hungriest months of the year, as or when the deportees return. Deportees to Zimbabwe have little likelihood of finding formal, productive employment and will merely exacerbate the plight of struggling households.

In addition to recommending urgent provision of both food and seeds, the authors make recommendations that include the following:

1. The grinding poverty of many rural Zimbabweans needs to be a priority with government and with the international community: there is a need to urgently address matters of economic development, as food handouts cannot be a permanent solution.
2. It is therefore imperative for the SADC facilitation to proceed with greater urgency in order to facilitate a more constructive dialogue with the donor countries over more substantive development assistance, even during this interegnum phase of the GPA.
3. Civil society in Zimbabwe needs to include the social and economic rights of all Zimbabweans on their lobbying agendas, broadening their current focus from human rights and political rights.
4. The recommendations made to Cabinet to promote the recovery of industries in Bulawayo, need to implemented speedily in order to regenerate some of the 20,000 jobs lost there in the last two years.
5. The Government of South Africa should reconsider its policy of renewed deportations of Zimbabweans, which is poised to exacerbate poverty and hunger in many parts of Zimbabwe.

Notes:

[1] Most of Matabeleland South suffered almost total crop failure in the last growing season – as did extensive parts of Midlands, Masvingo and parts of Manicaland. The hunger we document in this report is being experienced more widely in Zimbabwe.

Please cite this report as follows: Solidarity Peace Trust (2011) “Hard Times” Matabeleland: urban deindustrialization – and rural hunger. Durban: Solidarity Peace Trust

For requests for interviews, please email

Selvan Chetty: selvan@solidaritypeacetrust.org
Shari Eppel: shari@solidaritypeacetrust.org
Brian Raftopoulos: brian@solidaritypeacetrust.org

In Hopley Farm, Harare, 8,500 adults live in makeshift housing: out of 2,000 school age children, 75% are out of formal school. (July 2010)

By Busani Mpofu

The World Bank estimated urban poverty in Zimbabwe in 1990/91 to be 12 percent while the 1995 Poverty Assessment Study found urban poverty to be 39 percent. In January 2009, Save the Children estimated that 10 out of 13 million Zimbabweans, over 75 percent of the population, were living in ‘desperate poverty.’ In April 2010, UNICEF noted that 78 percent of Zimbabweans were “absolutely poor” and 55 percent of the population, (about 6.6 million) lived under the food poverty line while New Zimbabwe estimated that more than 65 percent of Zimbabweans lived below the poverty datum line in December 2009. Recently, commentators have argued that it is very clear that poverty is increasing in the country. The sense we get from the above statistics is that some agencies have defined certain percentages of Zimbabweans as poor, below some abstractly conceived poverty lines. The statistics, however, do not tell us how long those poor people have existed in poverty conditions or the historical and social dimensions of people’s understandings of poverty-what it is to ‘be poor.’

This article attempts to tackle some perceptions about poverty in Zimbabwe, partly addressing the issue of the changing understandings of what being ‘poor’ has meant to those perceived as poor. Drawing from the experiences of the urban poor, I also attempt to explore historical and social dimensions of people’s understandings of poverty-what it is to ‘be poor’. This is partly because what people do for themselves, as poverty alleviation strategies, presumably turns crucially on how they understand their own circumstances (rather than on whether the state or some other agency defines them as poor or not). Inevitably, the centrality of unemployment as the main cause of poverty featured high among urban Africans during the colonial period. The conception of unemployment, however, appeared to have changed in the post-colonial era especially after 2000 when some professional jobs like teaching began to be associated with poverty.

Perceptions on identifying poverty, its causes and solutions as perceived by the poor themselves, politicians, planners, practitioners, academics and outsiders vary considerably. Other scholars have contended that the problem of defining and fighting poverty is more of a political and technical problem than a rational activity while Pete Alcock argued that we need not look further than politics and politicians to find the causes of poverty as they run the country and are therefore responsible for the problems within it. Understanding poverty thus also requires an understanding of the social policies which have been developed in response to it and which have thus removed, restructured or even recreated it.

A challenge with studying poverty is that it has many facets and people have their own varied and changing notions of it. Worse still, the poor themselves are not a homogeneous group, they are diverse. According to John Iliffe, it is their diversity that makes it even harder to study them. The above problematic is also related to various contested definitions of poverty used by anthropologists, economists, development workers, geographers, sociologists and urban planners and historians. Economists sometimes use indexes and formulas to back up their theories that may be very confusing to historians, while sociologists and development workers may feel they have the monopoly of writing about poverty because of the proximity of their work to the poor in societies and also because the they have at times used the word poverty as a catchword for some of their programmes.

There is therefore no one correct, scientific, agreed definition of poverty because poverty is inevitably a political concept, and thus inherently a contested one.

Full article available for download below in PDF format.

Rights reserved: Please credit the Solidarity Peace Trust as the original source for all SPT material republished on other websites unless otherwise specified. Please provide a link back to http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/1109/some-perceptions-on-the-poverty-question-in-zimbabwe/ for this report

This article can be cited in other publications as follows: Mpofu, B. (2011) ‘Some Perceptions on the Poverty Question in Zimbabwe’, 16 September, Solidarity Peace Trust: http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/1109/some-perceptions-on-the-poverty-question-in-zimbabwe/

Food aid being distributed in Zimbabwe

By Norma Kriger

Western donors understandably tread warily in Zimbabwe where ZANU PF remains the overwhelmingly dominant governing party in a formal coalition government. The “Inclusive Government” (IG) was formed in February 2009, following the signing of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) in September 2008 by ZANU PF, Tsvangirai’s MDC (MDC-T) and a smaller MDC formation. Western governments, initially opposed to the formation of a coalition government, continue to enforce travel bans and asset freezes against ZANU PF individuals and ZANU PF-affiliated entities. ZANU PF has persisted with its strident animosity to Western governments and donors, and has made these sanctions policies a major reason for stalling on the implementation of the GPA. While ZANU PF blames the sanctions for retarding economic recovery, Western bilateral donors rightly point to their substantial humanitarian aid – nearly US$651 million or 15-20% of GDP in 2009. This aid also happens to boost the image of the MDC parties, which were allocated Ministerial control of services, including health and education, while ZANU PF ensured it retained the security and foreign affairs Ministries, among others.

The role of Western foreign aid in this highly polarized internal politics is surely one reason why analysts have not focused much on its actual political impact. Instead, the politics of the political parties’ discourse or rhetoric has received much more attention, with particular focus on how ZANU PF depicts the West as undermining national sovereignty and seeking regime change. Another reason for the relative dearth of analysis about the political effects of foreign aid would seem to be some acquiescence that Western donor aid has generally benefited the opposition forces, chiefly MDC-T and civil society organizations, as intended.

Using a few cases drawn mainly from recently published reports whose main concerns were not about foreign aid, I highlight some dilemmas of foreign aid in Zimbabwe today. These cases suggest that, as in many other countries (Gourevitch, 2010), foreign aid has also had unintended and/or perverse political consequences in Zimbabwe. Its perverse impacts appear to include the strengthening of ZANU PF’s power and patronage resources and arguably a weakening of opposition forces or the shaping of an opposition ill-suited to transforming authoritarian rule.

International NGOs’ aid hijacked by ZANU PF

Recently, while reading The Anatomy of Terror (2011, anonymous, to protect researchers and informants) – a fascinating document that examined ZANU PF militia bases’ organization, resources, and personnel through detailed studies of 15 selected constituencies – I learned that some high profile international NGOs had their aid partially or fully hijacked by ZANU PF since the signing of the GPA. In some constituencies, the study noted, the operations of the international NGOs (INGOs) were “judged to be entirely ZANU PF run”, while in others aid distribution was compromised. The list of INGOs included Environment Africa, Mercy Corps, GOAL, Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam GB, and World Vision. The report also identifies local NGOs’ projects which have been compromised by ZANU PF intervention in aid distribution. Since most local NGOs survive primarily on foreign donor funds, such aid diversion is also relevant for this discussion.

Based on the report, INGOs which operate in ZANU PF-controlled districts and use local councilors and traditional authorities to distribute aid are prime candidates to have their aid hijacked by ZANU PF. In ZANU PF-controlled districts, these institutions are run by ZANU PF loyalists. But aid channeled through MDC councilors, as in particular wards in Zaka West (Masvingo Province), was also apparently captured by pro-ZANU PF traditional authorities. In at least two other cases, individual strongmen were able to redirect aid from its intended beneficiaries to ZANU PF loyalists. One example comes from Buhera South (Manicaland Province) and involves Joseph Chinotimba, a losing House of Assembly candidate in 2008 and a notorious “war veteran”. The report, like many others, describes him as having been directly involved in multiple rapes and two murder cases and also as a leader in urban company and farm invasions after 2000. He reportedly set up a committee chaired by a ZANU PF chief to control the entry of NGOs into the constituency. According to the report, Chinotimba acts as if Mercy Corps’ borehole drilling project belongs to him: he distributes the organization’s equipment to beneficiaries, claiming the funds and clean water assistance come directly from him.

If The Anatomy of Terror is accurate, what should be the response of the organizations whose aid has been diverted? Article 16.4(b) of the GPA forbids NGOs to provide humanitarian assistance that discriminates on the basis of political affiliation. Should affected NGOs invoke the GPA prohibition against the partisan distribution of humanitarian assistance whenever and wherever it is violated? Should they threaten to suspend all their other projects in the country if aid diversion occurs in select areas? Should they at least publicize who is diverting aid and where it is being diverted? If they maintain a silence about non-transparent aid distribution, how do we even know how widespread aid diversion is? How should they balance their organizational interests in maintaining their projects, the jobs they provide for locals and international staff, and the benefits they provide to locals in some areas against the direct role their aid has had in bolstering the local power and patronage of ZANU PF henchmen?

Donor-funded constitutional outreach program creates opportunity for ZANU PF to rebuild rural influence

The writing of a new constitution, a referendum on the draft constitution, and then an election are key components of the GPA. The constitutional outreach program, an important step in the constitution-making process, was designed to solicit the preferences of the population. The model for the constitution-making process agreed to by the three principals in the government was that Members of Parliament (Senators and House of Assembly representatives) would head each outreach team. Between June and November 2010, the outreach program made Parliament inactive as MPs earned handsome per diems from foreign donors, over and above their MP salaries and allowances.

In January 2010, SWRadio Africa published a list of perpetrators of political violence associated with the 2008 presidential election run-off who would be involved in the constitutional outreach program. Of the 44 named perpetrators along with details of the ways in which they were involved in electoral violence, many were ZANU PF Senators or MPs or ZANU PF candidates who lost in the 2008 elections. Objections were raised about UNDP, a major funder, paying per diems to known perpetrators on the teams, the issue being that it fostered impunity and lack of accountability. But at least according to ActionAid Denmark, the political impact of multilateral and bilateral foreign donor support for the constitutional outreach program was significant for reasons beyond funding individual human rights violators.

ActionAid’s report, A Gathering Storm (November 2010), claims that ZANU PF used the outreach process both to successfully campaign for its positions on the new constitution in rural areas and also to rebuild its party’s rural influence, especially in Mashonaland East, West and Central Provinces and Manicaland. Because ZANU PF’s campaign for its preferred constitutional provisions often used violence and intimidation, the party also shrank the political space available for other political parties and positions at outreach meetings. ActionAid noted that unlike ZANU PF, “neither MDC nor civil society have launched any attempt to seriously influence, let alone dominate, the process.” (s.8) In a footnote, ActionAid commented that ZANU PF’s successful strategies were heavily dependent on donor funds and listed not only the UNDP but also Australia, Denmark, the EU, France, Holland, the UK, and the USA, saying: “It is ironical that Zanu-PF in this way seem to have re-conquered lost ground utilizing a process almost entirely funded by its declared Western arch-enemies.” (fn 18, s.33)

If an unintended consequence of the donor-funded constitutional outreach process was indeed to facilitate ZANU PF’s re-building of its rural influence, donor support for democracy-building backfired. Should donors treat all governing parties in an even-handed manner in their democracy promotion programs, even when it means supporting a party that has shown no signs of abandoning its authoritarian agenda and strategic use of political violence and intimidation against its opponents? Bilateral donor funding of the outreach program meant at least indirect support for many ZANU PF MPs and other ZANU PF leaders who are on Western sanctions’ lists because of their involvement in human rights abuses – and, according to the January 2010 list published by SWRadio Africa, still other ZANU PF leaders who were central organizers of local level violence in 2008 but seem to have escaped Western sanctions. How do donors reconcile support for the constitution-making process with at least indirect support for those on Western sanctions’ lists?

Civil society organizations and the MDC-T

There is some consensus among observers and analysts that opposition forces – local civil society organizations and NGOs and the MDC formations – have lost steam during the GPA and are in a defensive mode. Some analysts have accorded donors a role in the weakening of opposition forces, thus highlighting the unintended consequences of donor aid. While Raftopoulos (2010) highlights donors’ emphasis on human rights agendas and the removal of a single leader at the expense of developmental issues since the emergence of an opposition in the late 1990s, ActionAid (2010) hints at donor per diems themselves having affected the nature and character of civic organizations – largely urban-based, and chiefly Harare-based (like the donor organizations themselves), seldom membership-based, and as Raftopoulos also notes, heavily focused on monitoring and reporting. Mindful of the enormous obstacles to organizing in rural areas where ZANU PF-organized coercion and patronage still prevail, the report remarks on the astonishing lack of rural organizations under volunteer leadership that mobilize against local authorities on the basis of local grievances. ActionAid comments:

“Even after several decades of realizing that the political power in Zimbabwe mainly rests in the rural areas and that the rural areas are host to the majority of the people needing the largest improvement in livelihood, the rural areas are practically nude of locally implanted or [locally] connected CSOs. Some watchdog organizations might have local representatives in rural areas … but it appears that their task is mainly that as of conduits of information… They are rarely autonomous local leaders linked to a national network.”

These broad brush claims about the impact of donor aid on domestic organized opposition need to be supplemented or checked against more detailed examinations of specific organizations. The coexistence of a remarkably subdued population and an opposition movement that had plenty of donor support requires careful analysis for its lessons for organized opposition and democracy-building programs. Did donor support unintentionally contribute to creating an opposition movement that is not only donor-dependent but also ill-suited to the type of opposition movement needed to confront authoritarian rule in the rural hinterland?

Humanitarian aid

Humanitarian aid has been critical to the revival of basic service delivery, including health and education. Most of this aid does not go directly to the government because Western bilateral donors would like to see more government progress in the implementation of the GPA. At the end of 2010, some INGOs told me that they looked forward to the normalization of donor-government relations as they were accustomed to working with governments in other environments. Donors have now committed funds to the African Development Bank for projects that do provide more scope for government involvement. While criticisms of donors for not directly funding the government abound, internal and external actors rarely, if ever, voice criticism of humanitarian aid for helping to keep alive a government (albeit primarily “one section of it” as ZANU PF is often referred to in diplomatic parlance) that has failed to adhere to most provisions of the GPA.

An unfulfilled provision of the GPA relates to the provision of humanitarian assistance to internally displaced people (IDPs), yet one seldom, if at all, hears the international humanitarian community even raise the issue. Article 16.4 (c) of the GPA stipulates “that all displaced persons shall be entitled to humanitarian and food assistance to enable them to return and settle in their original homes and that social welfare organizations shall be allowed to render such assistance as might be required.” IDPs constitute as many as almost 8 per cent of the population (1 million people), making Zimbabwe among the countries with large percentages of IDPs. (IDMC, 2010) Most of these IDPs are the product of the previous ZANU PF government’s actions – farm invasions that displaced farm workers, arbitrary evictions of people from their homes in cities and towns, evictions of informal mine workers, and electoral violence. Under the IG, forced displacement continues, chiefly through ongoing farm invasions but also arbitrary evictions in areas of mining operations.

When the IG was formed, it showed some openness to addressing issues of forced internal displacement but soon retreated. The IG conducted a small-scale assessment of IDPs with UN agencies in August 2009 but the government has refused to release the results (IDMC, 2010). Unfortunately, the MDC parties seem to have no political motivation to challenge ZANU PF on the issue as the majority of IDPs are farm workers, many of whom are not even registered to vote. So another component of the GPA remains unenforced, and unlike those provisions relating to MDC governmental positions, is largely a suppressed issue. Should the international humanitarian community advocate for IDPs, a group that ZANU PF still apparently prefers to treat as if it does not exist, if seeking government permission to help IDPs might threaten the provision of humanitarian aid to other sections of the population?

Another serious dilemma for the humanitarian community is its support for basic services while ZANU PF loots diamond mining revenue for its own party purposes, including paying salaries and providing patronage to the security sector and recently even paying civil servants a salary increase. The MDC-headed Finance Ministry meanwhile is deprived of control of a substantial source of revenue. The international humanitarian community’s logic is presumably that improvement in service delivery (which remains enormously deficient) not only produces benefits for the local population but will redound to the credit of opposition parties which have Ministerial control of services. But the premise is that there will be a democratic election which the MDC will win – a prospect that grows dimmer by the day. At what point does the international humanitarian community say that the economy is generating enough revenue for the government to be able to provide basic services to its population?

Conclusion

The politically charged environment in which donor aid is provided in Zimbabwe and the role that aid itself plays in inflaming domestic politics should stimulate rather than mute analysis and debate about the role of foreign aid. The cases presented above illustrate the unenviable dilemmas facing foreign donors in Zimbabwe’s difficult operating environment where well-intentioned aid seems to have unintentionally contributed to weakening the opposition forces and strengthening ZANU PF. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and Zimbabwe seems well along that road for many reasons that have nothing to do with foreign aid. It is important to know if and how foreign aid may have unwittingly pushed Zimbabwe perhaps faster and further along that path and to begin to consider how withdrawal of aid or its redesign may enable taking a less destructive way.

Rights reserved: Please credit the author, and Solidarity Peace Trust, as the original source for all material republished on other websites unless otherwise specified. Please provide a link back to http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org

This article can be cited in other publications as follows: Kriger, N. (2011) ‘Foreign Aid Dilemmas under Zimbabwe’s Inclusive Government’, 12 August, Solidarity Peace Trust: http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/1092/foreign-aid-dilemmas/

References

ActionAid Denmark, A Gathering Storm: Zimbabwe’s final hope for reform? December 11, 2010. http://www.kubatana.net/docs/demgg/msdk_zimreport_101211.pdf (accessed July 29, 2011).

Anonymous, The Anatomy of Terror (June 10, 2011, distributed by Sokwanele). http://www.sokwanele.com/thisiszimbabwe/archives/6800 (accessed July 29, 2011).

Gourevitch, Philip, “Alms Dealers: Can you provide humanitarian aid without facilitating conflicts?”, The New Yorker, October 11, 2010.

IDMC, Global Overview of Trends and Developments in 2010, March 2011 http://www.internal-displacement.org/publications/global-overview-2010.pdf (accessed July 20, 2011).

Raftopoulos, Brian, “The Global Political Agreement as a ‘Passive Revolution’: Notes on Contemporary Politics in Zimbabwe”, The Round Table, 99:411, December 14, 2010, 705-718. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00358533.2010.530414 (accessed July 20, 2011).

Statement by Owen Sheers

In 2004 I published The Dust Diaries, an account of my journey tracing the life and legacy of my great, great uncle, the maverick missionary and activist for African rights Arthur Shearly Cripps. My journey in Cripps’ footsteps finished at his graveside in the knave of a ruined church deep in the Zimbabwean veldt. The church was built by Cripps in the style of Great Zimbabwe. It was midnight and hundreds of people were packed between its walls, dancing and singing around my uncle’s grave. Fires picked out the shape of the kopje that rose above us, testament to the 700 Zimbabweans who had, despite fuel shortages and other difficulties, made the journey to this isolated place to celebrate Arthur’s life and remember his fifty years living and working with the Shona people around Chivhu. The celebrations lasted for three days. Remarkably ecumenical in nature, both Anglican service and traditional Shona pungwe, they constituted the annual ‘Shearly Cripps Festival’, an event attended by Zimbabwean Anglicans for over fifty years.

This year the Shearly Cripps festival has not been allowed to happen. On August 2^nd it was reported that excommunicated Anglican Bishop Nolbert Kunonga, an outspoken supporter of President Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF, claimed to have ‘taken over’ the Shearly Cripps Shrine, along with all other church properties in the Masvingo Province. Sadly the local police have enforced Kunonga’s claims, despite repeated court orders ruling access to Anglican properties should be open to all. This claim follows over ten years of similar actions by Kunonga, including inciting violence against those attending services under the direction of the legitimate Archbishop of Harare. As with his actions over the Shearly Cripps Shrine the police, ignoring court orders, have often acted in collusion with Kunonga, even tear-gassing church-goers.

As a descendent of Arthur Shearly Cripps I strongly condemn Kunonga’s illegal seizure of the Shearly Cripps Shrine and all other Anglican Church properties in Masvingo Provience and call upon Kunonga to revoke his false claims. Given the nature of Cripps’ activist work – fighting for indigenous land rights, defending local people against colonial injustice, building the country’s first VD clinic for indigenous Zimbabweans – Kunonga’s actions in denying access to his shrine and inciting violence against the Anglican community are particularly sickening and perverse. Extraordinary though the actions of Kunonga and the police may seem they are also, unfortunately, all too indicative of the cronyism, corruption and injustice that have marred the ZANU PF regime in Zimbabwe for over the last ten years.

Cripps strived all his life for equality and justice. When he died he left all his land to the local people who had lived and farmed on that land for many years. In the light of his work and his legacy it is particularly saddening that the kind of actions Cripps fought against during his time in colonial Southern Rhodesia should be echoed now by Kunonga in a post-colonial Zimbabwe.

Notes for Editors

- Bishop Kunonga was excommunicated from the Anglican Church in Africa after his violent actions, including encouraging physical attacks on people attending Sunday services under the direction of the legitimate Archbishop of Harare.

- It was recently reported that Kunonga broke into the church in Chivhu with the connivance of the police, who refuse to take any complaint from the Anglican church about these events. Government controlled Zimbabwean television has endorsed Kunonga’s activities, and have publicized his takeover as a matter of fact.

- Arthur Shearly Cripps was a poet, activist and independent missionary to Zimbabwe who lived in Zimbabwe from 1901 until his death in 1952. Throughout his time in the country he fought tirelessly for African rights, and specifically African land rights, publishing a book entitled An Africa for Africans in 1927.

- Both Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing have cited Cripps as an influential figure in the development of liberal social activism in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe

- Jodi Bieber, winner of the premier World Press Photo of the Year Award 2011, attended the Shearly Cripps festival with Owen Sheers in 2000.  To contact Jodi about these images please visit this link.

- Owen Sheers is a poet and author. He recently wrote the script for National Theatre of Wales and Michael Sheen’s The Passion. The Dust Diaries won the Welsh Book of the Year 2005 and is currently being translated into Shona. Owen is available for interview.

Links

• Life for Zimbabwe Anglicans worsens with properties commandeered, priests arrested
• The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers

For authoritarian parties like Zanu PF, all these forms of having to answer to various fora are anathema, as they provide varying means of eroding the monopoly of power that the regime has become completely accustomed to. The accumulation of small reforms and the slow dispersal of power provide a major challenge for such structures of authoritarian power, as they provide the possibility of a cumulative momentum of dissent that can be very difficult to control. When combined to the major challenge of the succession problem in Zanu PF, now an very urgent issue in the light of Mugabe’s waning health, these factors have pushed Zanu PF into emergency election mode.

The challenge for Zanu PF since the signing of the GPA, and more urgently following the Livingstone meeting, has been to decide on what strategies to deploy in the next election campaign. The party’s recidivist impulse to return to violence is clearly very strong, particularly given the increasing control of the party and the state by the securocrats. Moreover the reports of various human rights organization have shown growing evidence of the low level, pre-election intimidation emerging in the country designed to pre-empt any forms of opposition activity in the public sphere, with the specter of North Africa clearly haunting the calculations of the military-political elite. The Zanu PF election campaign message has concentrated on the dual issue of the indigenization and anti-sanctions campaign, with the connection being that both are designed, in the party’s view, to confront the continuing threats to national sovereignty.

However whereas in the period between 2000-2008 the message around the land had some purchase both in the country and the region, the recent attempt to reload the message in a different form, has proved much more hollow both nationally and regionally. The stern rebuke of SADC at the Livingstone meeting placed the issue of Zanu PF violence and coercion at the forefront of its resolutions. Moreover the resolution to appoint a team of officials to work with JOMIC to ensure the monitoring, evaluation and implementation of the GPA, was a direct challenge to the Mugabe regime’s persistent rhetoric on national sovereignty.

The frantic, angry and strategically stupid attacks by Zanu PF spokespersons to the Livingstone position, SADC, and the South African President, indicates the very real threat that the SADC position holds for Mugabe’s party. The once taken- for- granted regional solidarity against the West is no longer so easily available, and at a stroke a key part of the Zanu PF strategy over the last decade has been placed under threat. The vehement lobbying by Zanu PF representatives ahead of the full SADC summit in Sandton on the 11-12 June was another indication of the panic that the recent SADC position has caused in Zanu PF.

Moreover the resolutions of the Sandton meeting, notwithstanding the claims of the state media in Zimbabwe, largely confirmed the resolutions of the Livingstone summit, even if the language of the communiqué was calibrated in more moderate terms. More particularly the SADC summit in South Africa confirmed the Livingstone resolutions through the facilitator’s situation report, confirmation of the decision to appoint SADC representatives to join the JOMIC team, and through its commitment to the election roadmap. Both the Livingstone and Sandton meetings thus confirmed the central purpose of the mediation and the GPA, namely the establishment of conditions for generally acceptable elections in order to settle the central problem of state legitimacy in Zimbabwe.

Notwithstanding the continuities in the objectives of the mediation from the Mbeki to the Zuma administrations, the one major difference between the two, as South African analyst Siphamandla Zondi has noted, has been that while Mbeki’s emphasis was placed on building consensus amongst the primary actors in Zimbabwe, Zuma has complemented this by his concentration on building a stronger regional consensus against the obstructive behavior of the Mugabe regime.  In particular Zuma has developed closer relations with the Angolan president who always felt slighted and marginalized by former President Mbeki. Zuma’s strategy was also determined by Zanu PF’s attempts to undermine the ANC in the region in order to ensure the solidarity of the region. There has now been a shift in this regional balance that has also been affected by the more effective lobbying in SADC by both MDCs, and the greater respect they have earned in the region since 2008.

The fact that the West was largely marginalized in the SADC mediation, also allowed Zuma to build a more effective African consensus to take a stronger stand against the abuses of Zanu PF. This factor is one of the key differences with the current situation in North Africa, the Middle East and particularly Libya, where Western intervention, both diplomatic and military, has clouded the issues much more for the opposition. Western intervention in the Middle East is of course dictated by the major issue of oil reserves, its strategic military positions in the region, and the position of Israel, all of which dwarf the West’s interests in democratization in this part of the world. The Mugabe message peddlers have not been slow to point out the duplicity of the West on the democratic agenda, but Zanu PF’s depravity on this issue has removed the sting from any critique it once offered in this area. Progressive anti-imperialism abroad cannot long outlast vicious repressive practices at home.

SADC and the democratic forces in Zimbabwe must now move to ensure a broad consensus with the West in implementing all key aspects of the GPA, with the regional body leading the construction of such a consensus. Zanu PF must be left with little doubt that any further attempts to forestall the GPA through violence and repression, will be met with a more unified condemnation that will leave little room for continued unilateral actions. Such pressure may also lead to more realistic political discussions between the parties that will deal not only with elections processes but the possibility of transfer of power, in which area both the mediation and the GPA has been very weak. Thus the role of the security sector has to be dealt with by SADC, even if it is unrealistic to expect major security sector reform in the pre-election period. Such reforms are a long-term process, but at the minimum the role of the security sector in the elections process and pre-election violence, must be placed under close enough scrutiny to make it a non-viable election strategy for Zanu PF.

Please cite this article as follows: Raftopoulos, B. (2011) ‘SPT-Zimbabwe Update No.3. June 2011: Beyond Livingstone’, 24 June, Solidarity Peace Trust: http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/1079/spt-zimbabwe-update-no-3/