By Obie Madondo
The recent criticism of Arthur Mutambara’s Heroes’ Day speech is an attack on a new consciousness that the prolonged Zimbabwe crisis has sired. This consciousness is unequivocally critical of the West’s rigid and counterproductive position against Robert Mugabe. It resents the West’s coddling of opposition MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai as much as Mugabe’s dictatorship. Mostly, it resents Tsvangirai’s jinxed leadership.
Former South African President, Nelson Mandela, recently suggested that Zimbabwe’s crisis was a failure of leadership. He implied that both Mugabe and Tsvangirai had failed Zimbabwe. The March 29 election produced an electoral front-runner but not a president. The disputed June 27 re-run produced an unacceptable president. The ongoing talks have yet to create democratic leadership.
Both Mugabe and Tsvangirai are now a liability. The Zimbabwe Mugabe now proposes is a cauldron of bigoted authoritarian nationalism masquerading as African self-determination. Tsvangirai is unequivocally pro-West. On the surface his proposed Zimbabwe is an antidote to Mugabe’s. In reality, it is an acquiescing proxy country that will host secret CIA torture chambers while staying silent on Western excesses.
Both propositions are unacceptable.
Mutambara earned the political capital that should allow him to propose a different direction. With 10 seats, Mutambara’s MDC faction holds the swing vote in the lower house of Parliament, where Tsvangirai faction and Mugabe’s Zanu-PF are separated by just one seat. His proposed Zimbabwe is one that honors Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle while insisting on being treated as an equal by the rest of the world. Unlike Tsvangirai, Mutambara is proposing a Zimbabwe that is also willing to challenge the West’s criminal and genocidal military adventure in Iraq.
Now Mutambara is accused of currying favour with Mugabe by parroting the dictator’s anti-West rhetoric. Nonsense! Mugabe does not hold the Zimbabwean monopoly to criticize the West. No sane and peace-loving Zimbabwean condones Guantanamo Bay, the American Gulag. At the core, Zimbabweans share the same revulsion of America’s frequent double standards and abuse of power.
In his speech, Mutambara justifiably asked: “Where are the Western democratic demands to Egypt, Angola, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Israel, Pakistan, and Kuwait? Moreover, what does the record of the US and UK in Iraq, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay teach us?” Mutambara’s critics have yet to answer these questions.
Mutambara went on: “Who took out Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende and Kwame Nkrumah?” The West did. These individuals, leaders of sovereign countries, had become expendable because they stood in the way of American imperial interests.
Again, Mutambara asked: “Who created and nursed Mobutu Sese Seko, Sadam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Jonas Savimbi and Osama Bin Laden?” Again, the West did. These criminals were one-time assets of America’s imperial ambition.
In attacking the West’s proven double standards and patronizing arrogance Mutambara vocalized what Zimbabweans feel at the core. He played the quintessential critic and fearless, independent mind. His chief crime: he is a black African criticizing the benevolent and almighty white West. His other crime is praising Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, which humbled the white supremacist arrogance of Rhodesia. Mutambara rubbed salt into an immortal white wound.
Forget the hullabaloo about racial tolerance, the West is yet to regard black Africans as equals, let alone accept their criticism. The West has a new definition of an acceptable black person – the Mandelas, Obamas and Tsvangirais.
But here is the contradiction:
Throughout the 1970s and '80s, Apartheid South African banned the then liberation movement, African National Congress (ANC) and designated it a terrorist group. The United States designated Mandela a terrorist; he required special certification from the US secretary of state every time he visited the US.
This is the same Nelson Mandela who spent 27 years in jail for fighting Apartheid; the same Mandela elected South Africa's first black president in 1994. It is the same Mandela who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his reconciliatory leadership which helped South Africa transition peacefully from Apartheid to majority rule. This is the same Mandela who speaks for global justice, an undisputed world statesman and international symbol of reconciliation, peace and freedom. It is the same Mandela who is good friends with former US President, Bill Clinton.
The US only removed Mandela from this infamous list in 2008. Mandela liberated everyone else but himself. This is the kind of African the West is comfortable with. Isn’t this the modern manifestation of racism?
US Democratic candidate for the White House, Barack Obama, is the ideal African American. His conciliatory position makes whites less guilty about slavery and racism. Some radical Obama critics credit his phenomenal success to an unwritten “deal” he allegedly struck with white America, where he will not to rub history in its face in exchange for support for his White House.
The pro-West Tsvangirai is easy for the West to deal with, but no Mandela or Obama. Since becoming leader of the MDC Tsvangirai has never criticized the West. He is yet to honor a liberation struggle that freed him from racist colonial rule. The West purchased Tsvangirai’s conscience with the unprecedented sympathy and moral and material support it has lavished on him in the last ten years. Tsvangirai’s humble education and lack of sophistication has made him the essence of an acquiescing African. He is the epitome of a new and disturbing African inferiority complex.
But what’s to be said of educated Zimbabwean critics of Mutambara? They shamelessly seek the West’s approval through unrestrained Mugabe-bashing. In dealing with European and American hegemony, they practice debilitating self-censorship. They invent myths and excuses to mask their inferiority complex. The West is far too powerful, we are told. We need the West more than the West needs us, etc.
Maybe we are still colonized, mentally, after all? In Australia, South and North America, Europeans conquered the natives’ land. In Africa, they failed to conquer the black person’s land but successfully appropriated most of his conscience.
Heidi Holland, the author of the book Dinner With Mugabe, tells us that the British treated Mugabe condescendingly during the Lancaster House talks. He was bullied, belittled, denigrated and subjected to socially humiliating treatment in a move that sought to weaken him. Mugabe gave in to British power and embraced the same inferiority complex that’s now afflicting Tsvangirai.
The British gave Zimbabwe a constitution that required the protection of white economic privileges acquired through black slavery, lynching and outright theft. They gave Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe. Mugabe relentlessly sought the West’s approval. In the name of reconciliation, he forgave former Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Douglas Smith, a war criminal whose regime slaughtered fifty thousands, mostly defenseless black women and children during the liberation struggle.
Then Mugabe slaughtered 20 000 during Gukurahundi and what happened? Gukurahundi partly sought to bolster security for white farms and other investments in Matabeleland and the Midlands. The West rewarded Mugabe with honorary degrees after the massacres. In 1994, the dictator became the Knight Commander of the Order of Bath, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Tsvangirai is treading Mugabe’s footsteps and this is exactly what irks Mutambara. Those who share his critical view of the West are informed by the unfortunate outcome and subsequent consequences of Lancaster House. They are fearful of another bad deal.
But Mutambara is simultaneously proposing a revisionist position on the Zimbabwe crisis while engaging the larger question of global citizenship. He is chastising both Mugabe and Tsvangirai. Mutambara is challenging the veiled racism that characterizes the West’s engagement of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is now a conglomeration of negative statistics, fodder for the Western intellectual articulation of Africa’s failed democratic project.
Christopher Bickerton, the co-editor of Politics without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations even suggests that the West is “using Mugabe as a stick to beat Africa” for failing to rid itself of tyrants.
By criticizing the West and Tsvangirai, Mutambara is risking his political career. Already he is deprived on the moral and material support lavished on Tsvangirai. The assault on his reputation has already begun with the futile effort to portray him as a Mugabe reincarnate.
Praising Zimbabwe’s liberation war is not Mugabeism. Criticizing the West’s criminal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is not Mugabeism. It is global citizenship.
If Mutambara is the great future he’s playing, he must be willing to risk it all for the sake of his conscience. He must continue to steer away from Zimbabweans who demean themselves and suppress their conscience for the sake of the West’s approval. Mutambara should be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and declare: give me the freedom of conscience or give me death! It is a matter of life and death. But this one is a different kind of death; it’s the death of the soul of Zimbabwe.
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