[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Debating Mamdani

[Patrick Bond]

London Review of Books
Letters
Vol. 30 No. 24 · Cover date: 18 December 2008
Lessons of Zimbabwe

 From R.W. Johnson

It may be true, as Mahmood Mamdani writes, that some Ugandans felt their 
real independence began when they kicked the Asians out, though 
President Museveni says it was the worst mistake the country ever made 
and has tried hard to persuade Asians to return (LRB, 4 December). 
Authoritarian populism has always had its imitators: Kristallnacht 
excited anti-semites throughout Europe at the thought of how much Jewish 
property they might seize. But the opposite happened in Zimbabwe, where 
Mugabe’s brutal dilapidation of the country had the effect of making Ian 
Smith’s Rhodesia seem like a lost golden age to many.

Mamdani’s article is a compendium of errors. He should know that the 
reason for the suspension of British aid for land reform was that the 
land was going to Mugabe’s cronies, not to the poor. At the same time, 
farmers could not sell farmland without first offering it for land 
reform, but time and again the government said it wasn’t interested. 
Even when the government did buy such land it often left productive 
farms to rot: I have seen the collapsing farmhouses, the fields full of 
weeds. But when the radical Edgar Tekere ran against Mugabe in 1990, 
Mugabe suddenly began threatening land invasions and the takeover of 
white farms. Mugabe saw Tekere off, thanks to massive ballot-stuffing, 
but it was clear that the land issue was kept in reserve in case of 
political crisis. When Mugabe lost the 2000 constitutional referendum, 
the strategy was wheeled out again.

Mamdani writes of the ‘war vets’ as if they all wanted to be farmers: 
those who worked with them say that wasn’t so. He also omits the fact 
that very few of the alleged war vets of the post-2000 period were any 
such thing. Most were far too young to have fought in the 1970s. Mamdani 
describes them as a popular movement but they weren’t: the land 
invasions were orchestrated by Mugabe’s party and security services. I 
saw this for myself, as did others. He talks of the constitutional 
referendum as if there had been a free vote but there wasn’t: not only 
did Mugabe allow the MDC no access to state-controlled radio and TV but 
there was massive rigging in the rural areas. Still it wasn’t enough, 
for Mugabe had underestimated the size of the ‘no’ vote the cities would 
cast. Mamdani describes the trade unions as if they were an 
Anglo-American creation and represented mainly Ndebeles. This is 
nonsense: they were left-wing organisations which had supported the 
liberation struggle and were closely tied to the (Communist-dominated) 
Congress of South African Trade Unions. Most of their members and their 
leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, were Shona – unsurprising, given that 80 per 
cent of the population is Shona. Their major foreign donor was the 
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the German Social Democratic foundation.

Mamdani talks as if ‘land reform’ was a popular revolution, which is 
rather like writing a history of Cambodia in which Pol Pot’s genocidal 
re-ruralisation was carried out by popular demand. I was part of a team 
that carried out nationwide polls in Zimbabwe throughout this period and 
we published all our findings widely. A steady 63 per cent said they 
wanted Mugabe out and no more than 9 per cent ever said land was the 
chief issue, a figure which soon dropped to 4 per cent. Mamdani does not 
mention the fact that the land invasions were a massive attack on farm 
workers, whose numbers he gives as 300,000, though together with their 
families there were 2.4 million of them living on white farms. They were 
principally blamed for Mugabe’s referendum defeat and were mercilessly 
beaten and tortured in dreadful weeks-long ‘re-education’ sessions. I 
had to deal with torture victims and saw things I never wish to see again.

Mamdani talks of the repression ‘in Ndebele areas in 1986’. Hasn’t he 
read the authoritative report Breaking the Silence, which shows how much 
wider than that the phenomenon was? Mamdani throughout underplays the 
huge role mass torture played in his supposed popular revolution, not 
just in Matabeleland and the Midlands in the 1980s but on farms in 
2000-2 and thereafter in the specially constituted torture camps set up 
by Mugabe which still operate today. Why does he omit these atrocities?

Mamdani remarks ‘how little turmoil accompanied this massive social 
change’. The mass beatings, the torture, the killings have all been 
whited out. He must know that more than four million people have fled 
Zimbabwe, that in this period life expectancy has fallen to the lowest 
on the planet, that five million people are facing starvation and 1.4 
million are at risk of cholera. In his account the main reason for the 
collapse in food production and the resulting famine is drought. 
Zimbabwe has often suffered droughts but up until the ‘land reform’ it 
always fed all its people and exported a lot more food as well. He also 
blames ‘sanctions’, yet there are no sanctions on Zimbabwean imports or 
exports and the reason international institutions won’t lend to Mugabe 
is that he has defaulted on repayment and reneged on their loan 
conditions. He also routinely steals any foreign exchange earned by his 
own people.

Colonial rule was racist and unfair and of course the whites took much 
of the best land. But in 1901 there were only 712,600 people in the 
whole country. Much of the land the whites settled was vacant. Under 
colonial rule, for all its faults, the population multiplied by ten (to 
7,477,443 in 1982) and a thriving commercial agriculture became the main 
motor of national growth and prosperity. Those whites who stayed on 
after 1980 embraced majority rule and tried hard to make it all work. 
And it could have: the country is blessed with mineral wealth, huge 
tourist potential and a highly educated population. All this was 
blighted by Mugabe’s Marxism-Leninism and the would-be one-partyism that 
drove investment away. Economic development was crippled, the 
fast-growing population couldn’t be supported and Mugabe became 
increasingly unpopular. In his rage he then turned on the one productive 
part of the economy that still functioned, the commercial farms, 
reducing Zimbabwe to famine, plague and ashes in his determination to 
stay in power whatever the cost. The exact figures are still unclear but 
it seems likely that the terrible things he has done to his country have 
caused over a million deaths.

R.W. Johnson
Cape Town

 From Terence Ranger

Mahmood Mamdani is correct to stress that Robert Mugabe is not just a 
crazed dictator or a corrupt thug but that he promotes a programme and 
an ideology that are attractive to many in Africa and to some in 
Zimbabwe itself. Mamdani takes care to balance this by recognising 
Mugabe’s propensity for violence. Yet this balance is hard to maintain 
and towards the end of his article Mamdani lets it slip.

‘Western countries,’ he writes, ‘brought their influence to bear on key 
Southern African Development Community (SADC) members – Botswana and 
Zambia – to split the organisation. Ian Khama, the president of 
Botswana, went so far as to announce publicly that he would not 
recognise the results of the 2008 elections.’ But Khama needed no 
Western influence to realise that the June presidential rerun in 
Zimbabwe was illegitimate. Every African observer mission – Botswana’s 
own, the Pan-African Parliament’s, SADC’s – pronounced that Mugabe’s 
victory was vitiated by the violence that went on right up until the 
polls, which the observers saw with their own eyes, and of which some of 
them were the victims. The problem is rather to explain why so many SADC 
states have continued to accept Mugabe as the legitimate president 
despite the first-hand reports of their own emissaries.

This isn’t a minor flaw in Mamdani’s article since it bears on his 
principal analytical point. He stresses the opposition between urban 
workers and rural peasants, the latter supporting Mugabe because of land 
restitution. Yet the violence between March and June this year took 
place overwhelmingly in the rural areas. It would not have been 
necessary had the peasantry of Mashonaland and Manicaland solidly 
supported the regime. The March election showed that they did not, 
despite land re-distribution. The regime lost virtually all the 
Manicaland seats and there were solid votes for the opposition even in 
Mashonaland constituencies which Zanu-PF had previously taken for 
granted. Indeed it was in such constituencies that the violence was 
concentrated.

Zimbabwean peasants confront hunger, disease, repression; they have no 
inputs of seeds, fertiliser and draught power. The redistribution of 
land has been conducted in a way that makes a mockery of the potentials 
of peasant production. Mugabe’s policy may be an inspiration to those in 
South Africa who want to redress gross inequalities in landholding. But 
it should also be a warning of how not to go about it.

Terence Ranger
Oxford

 From Matthias Tomczak

Mahmood Mamdani rightly points out the British government’s refusal to 
accept its responsibility to comply with the Lancaster House Agreement. 
It is worth pointing out that the terms of the agreement were from the 
beginning designed to underfund Zimbabwe’s land reform. The agreement 
allocated £75 million for payment to landowners (of which, as Mamdani 
states, only £44 million was spent when Labour abrogated it). This 
compares to the £500 million Britain made available for land acquisition 
and settlement support in Kenya after independence. Even if one takes 
into account the difference in population, equivalent funding for 
Zimbabwe would amount to some £200 million, which would have given 
peaceful land reform a much better chance of success.

Matthias Tomczak
Adelaide

 From Mahmood Mamdani

I was pained to find that the long bibliographical note accompanying my 
article ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’ was carried in the web version of the LRB 
but not in the printed text. I also regret that acknowledgments to key 
Zimbabwean scholars were not made in the body of the work. As the 
director of the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala from 1987 to 1996, 
I became keenly aware of a tendency among externally-based writers to 
make use of local research but seldom to acknowledge it.

I wish therefore to take this opportunity to record my reliance on a 
solid body of Zimbabwean research, most of it produced inside the 
country, and some in exile. For anyone wanting to understand the 
historical trajectory of land reform, the work of Sam Moyo, who directs 
the African Institute for Agrarian Studies in Harare, is indispensable. 
In addition, I would like to acknowledge W. Sadomba’s work on war 
veterans; Gregory Elich’s on sanctions; Lloyd Sachikonye’s on land 
economy; and Brian Raftopoulos, Ian Phimister, Patrick Bond and Masimba 
Manyanya’s on the labour movement. This work has been exemplary, 
inspired by a tradition that joins sustained research to an ongoing, 
politically sensitive internal debate.

Mahmood Mamdani
New York