MAHMOOD MAMDANI ON ZIMBABWE

Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan of Asian origin, is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Departments of Anthropology, Political Science and International Affairs at Columbia University and was recently elected one of the world's top 10 intellectuals. In this recently published article he expresses his views on the Zimbabwean crisis.

Lessons of Zimbabwe
Mahmood Mamdani

It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the explicit aim of unseating him.

There is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country’s economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country’s growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. This view of Zimbabwe’s crisis can be found everywhere, from the Economist and the Financial Times to the Guardian and the New Statesman, but it gives us little sense of how Mugabe has managed to survive. For he has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa. In any case, the preoccupation with his character does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved.

Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe.

What distinguishes Mugabe and Amin from other authoritarian rulers is not their demagoguery but the fact that they projected themselves as champions of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been denied by the colonial system. Not surprisingly, the justice dispensed by these demagogues mirrored the racialised injustice of the colonial system. In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin’s brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972 – and not the formal handover in 1962 – as the dawn of true independence. The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact.

[Keep reading here]

*****

N.B.1: You can read another interesting article by Mahmood Mamdani about Africa here.

N.B. 2: My own two lwei (that's the Angolan equivalent to two pence , tuppence, or two cents) on Zimbabwe and African post-colonial issues in general can be found - among other places, such as my 2000 MSc Dissertation, whose bibliography, incidentally, includes one of the authors cited by Mamdani: Phimister, on 'Commodity Relations and Class Formation in the Zimbabwean Countryside, 1898-1920', Journal of Pesant Studies 13,4 (1986) - here and here.

N.B.3: Se preferir ler algo sobre o assunto em Portugues, click aqui.

Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan of Asian origin, is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Departments of Anthropology, Political Science and International Affairs at Columbia University and was recently elected one of the world's top 10 intellectuals. In this recently published article he expresses his views on the Zimbabwean crisis.

Lessons of Zimbabwe
Mahmood Mamdani

It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the explicit aim of unseating him.

There is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country’s economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country’s growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. This view of Zimbabwe’s crisis can be found everywhere, from the Economist and the Financial Times to the Guardian and the New Statesman, but it gives us little sense of how Mugabe has managed to survive. For he has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa. In any case, the preoccupation with his character does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved.

Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe.

What distinguishes Mugabe and Amin from other authoritarian rulers is not their demagoguery but the fact that they projected themselves as champions of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been denied by the colonial system. Not surprisingly, the justice dispensed by these demagogues mirrored the racialised injustice of the colonial system. In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin’s brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972 – and not the formal handover in 1962 – as the dawn of true independence. The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact.

[Keep reading here]

*****

N.B.1: You can read another interesting article by Mahmood Mamdani about Africa here.

N.B. 2: My own two lwei (that's the Angolan equivalent to two pence , tuppence, or two cents) on Zimbabwe and African post-colonial issues in general can be found - among other places, such as my 2000 MSc Dissertation, whose bibliography, incidentally, includes one of the authors cited by Mamdani: Phimister, on 'Commodity Relations and Class Formation in the Zimbabwean Countryside, 1898-1920', Journal of Pesant Studies 13,4 (1986) - here and here.

N.B.3: Se preferir ler algo sobre o assunto em Portugues, click aqui.