Africanism: good for Africa? will new leadership emerge?

Commonweal, July 12, 2002 by Chris Chatteris

A time comes in the life of any institution or society when, for it to move forward, someone has to go. Until that person has exited, whether voluntarily or not, nothing can happen; not only is progress blocked, but decline is inexorable and inevitable. Such is the case with Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president since 1980, and now, after the recent election, hoping to last through to 2008, which he well might, since power seems to lend dictators longevity.

The need to remove these leadership obstacles to economic, social, and political progress is characteristic of the recent history of democracy in Africa: Consider Abacha in Nigeria, Mobutu in Zaire, Moi still in Kenya, and increasingly Sam Nujoma in Namibia. The energies of entire nations are focused on getting rid of old, ineffective, and stubborn autocrats, ruling long past their "sell-by" date. Even when it occurs, their removal may come too late. The damage they have inflicted is irreparable or, if everything goes well, it will take at least a generation to repair. A perfect example is the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By the time Mobutu left, the damage was complete. A priest who has given his life to Zimbabwe and knows it thoroughly stunned me recently with the observation that even if there were political change, it might not be possible to rebuild because the social, economic, and political depredations were, in his view, far more serious than people realized.

Why then does President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa support Mugabe? Mbeki's utterances, designed to placate his critics, have ranged from the supportive to the mildly wrist-slapping. The South African observer group sent to monitor the recent elections in Zimbabwe was chosen to echo its master's voice in Pretoria. Mbeki, unlike the classic lawyer-leader, is an economist who ought to understand that Mugabe is ruining his country's economy and creating political instability in the entire Southern African region. But there is a logic in this lunacy. The first strand of it is ideological. Mbeki and Mugabe come out of the same left-wing liberation tradition. Both fought the same colonial system. They are comrades in arms. That Mugabe would want to clear whites off farms and resettle them with rural black people is something that Mbeki, in his University of Sussex-trained mind, might regard as crazy. In his struggle-honed, Marxist-formed heart, however, he might find it acceptable, perhaps even desirable. To the Western observer, the farm occupations may give Mugabe the appearance of a poor man's Pol Pot or an even poorer man's Stalin--the wild and discredited notion that one can solve an economic and political problem in one fell swoop of social engineering. To the struggle mentality, such a move may be seen as bold, daring, and dashing. Perhaps Mbeki is like the Roman spectator watching his favorite gladiator doing what he would have neither the capacity nor the courage to do.

Ironically, this Marxist and therefore originally non-African strand of ideology meshes conveniently with the Africanism which is such an important part of the African National Congress's (ANC) tradition. Mbeki's "I am an African" speech (May 8, 1996) is an eloquent and subtle articulation of this tradition. Furthermore, the ANC always has to make sure it keeps this tradition at a boil, lest the more radically Africanist Pan African Congress outdo it in Africanism.

The events in Zimbabwe have demonstrated how easy it is in Southern Africa to portray social reality as a class struggle--the white, colonial overlords versus the black underclass, the urban black stooges of Western capitalism versus the children of the soil. There is much in this. The amount of land owned by white commercial farmers is vast; that occupied by black subsistence farmers is, per capita, pathetic. This is true of South Africa as well as Zimbabwe. The names on the gates of South African farms are mostly Afrikaans, except in KwaZulu-Natal where they are English and Scottish. In other words, the Marxist class struggle of industrial proletariat against capitalist becomes re-interpreted in black and white, Africa against the colonizing West. A luta continua! (the struggle continues!) as the Mozambican slogan has it.

Another aspect of the ANC and Mbeki's Africanism is intellectual, a conscious stance that systematically questions the Western perspective on reality. Does hiv cause aids? Western medicine says so and prescribes expensive Western antiretroviral drugs as a way of slowing the illness and preventing mother-to-child infection. The Africanist intellectual in Mbeki will at least question this. When former president Jimmy Carter, recently visiting South Africa, stated his belief in antiretrovirals, he was lambasted in the press by the ANC, an attack which may have been authorized by Mbeki himself. The West says that the Zimbabwean elections were seriously flawed; the Organization of African Unity says they were fine. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sees Mugabe as an election thief; for the Africanist Mugabe is a great and powerful chief taking on the lackeys of colonialism.