Robert Mugabe: a beast created by colonial Britain?
That Robert Mugabe's regime has brought Zimbabwe to its knees is unquestionable, but the responsibility for creating that regime lies uncomfortably closer to home. Michael Holman, a journalist who grew up in the town of Gwelo in Zimbabwe, explains.
Missing from the acres of newsprint devoted to coverage of Zimbabwe’s deepening crisis, absent from the radio and television coverage, is an unpalatable fact: Robert Mugabe is a creature shaped by British colonial rule. And a century after white settlers established the racially skewed land ownership that remains at the heart of the country’s turbulent politics, colonial chickens are coming home to roost.
It was British settlers who, in the 1890s, occupied the country soon to be called Southern Rhodesia; nearly a hundred years later, London played midwife to the birth of Zimbabwe, hosting the Lancaster House constitutional conference. With an almost audible sigh of relief, Britain welcomed an independent Zimbabwe.
But its responsibility lives on. Between the arrival of settlers and the handover to Mugabe in 1980, the UK record was a shoddy one.
Three decisions stand out:
- At the break-up in 1963 of the Central African Federation of Southern and Northern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe and Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1963, it was Britain that allocated the bulk of the Federal army to white-ruled Rhodesia. This gave the minority regime of Ian Smith the muscle to make a unilateral declaration of independence two years later, in 1965, and to wage war against black nationalist guerrillas.
It was Britain that effectively vetoed landlocked Zambia’s request in the early 1960s for World Bank funds to build a railway that would link it to the east African port of Dar es Salaam. The decision forced continued dependence on trade routes through apartheid South Africa – and rebel Rhodesia.
And it was Britain that reneged on the spirit, if not the letter, of a provision in the Lancaster House settlement intended to tackle the worst feature in the legacy of white rule - half the land was owned by whites. The UK contributed (in real terms) to the buyout of 5,000 white farmers in Zimbabwe just half the amount it had provided for a similar exercise in Kenya in the early 1960s – although its former East African colony had barely a thousand white farmers.
No one suggests that Robert Mugabe does not shoulder the bulk of the blame for today’s tragedy. Nelson Mandela has shown how leadership can transform a country. But it is this historical involvement in Zimbabwe that gives a unique British dimension and responsibility.
Of course, Zimbabwe matters for other reasons: the crisis is proving contagious, spilling over to southern African neighbours. Refugees head for South Africa and Zambia; Botswana puts up an electric fence to keep them out; SA dockworkers refuse to handle a China arms shipment bound for Zimbabwe; divisions between President Mbeki and his successor-in-waiting, Jacob Zuma, worsen; and there have been xenophobic attacks on Zimbabweans in South Africa.
And we should care about Zimbabwe not only because Britain’s past policies still influence events, but because we live in an inter-dependent world, where disease knows no boundaries; in which terrorism thrives in failed states like Somalia; because more and more economic and political refugees head for Europe; because a weak, misgoverned Africa will lack the capacity to play a role in the international, co-ordinated response essential to the success of any anti-global warming strategy.
Time is surely running out for Robert Mugabe. But the editorial writers who sharpen their pens in anticipation may be in danger of missing the point: they should be preparing not only the obituary of a dictator, but an epitaph for an empire – as well as a turning point for Africa.
Michael Holman is former Africa Editor of the Financial Times.
July 1 2008
