Some fine reporting from Christina Lamb, in the Sunday Times (£), tells us all we need to know about Zimbabwe's new leader - Emmerson Mnangagwa: just like Robert Mugabe — but younger, richer and even crueller. Amongst other damning revelations, it turns out that Mnangagwa was the man behind the most notorious and brutal crime of the Mugabe regime, Gukurahundi: a massacre in which an estimated 20,000 people from the Ndebele tribe in Matabeleland were killed or disappeared.
Mnangagwa was head of Zimbabwe’s spy agency, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), in the mid-1980s when the massacre was under way and is believed to have played a key role. “Mnangagwa was the leader of that army that did this Gukurahundi,” said Mtshumayeli Moyo, 60, the local head man, who was also abducted by soldiers. “I’m worried that what happened before will come back.”
Moyo had his identity card taken and ripped up but escaped with his life, he thinks, because he is partially crippled. His wife, Sihle, was so badly beaten that she could not walk for weeks.
The Fifth Brigade, trained by North Koreans and headed by Perence Shiri, who is now air force chief and was alongside Mnangagwa at his inauguration on Friday, spread terror throughout southern Zimbabwe from 1983 to 1987. The brigade set up camps in two schools and systematically went from village to village. Within six weeks more than 2,000 civilians had died, hundreds of homes had burnt down and thousands of civilians had been beaten.
Most of the dead were killed in public executions. Afterwards villagers were sometimes forced at gunpoint to dance on the freshly dug graves and sing pro-Mugabe songs. Entire families were burnt alive inside huts, women raped and mothers-to-be bayoneted.
Thirty years later many of those who witnessed the violence have now died in a country where life expectancy is, at 58, one of the lowest in the world. Others are scared to talk. Meetings I had set up at the start of the week were cancelled once Mnangagwa was announced as president.
Gukurahundi has never been officially acknowledged by the regime, and Mnangagwa has denied his role....
But the state-controlled Chronicle in Bulawayo reported him at the time likening dissidents to “bugs and cockroaches that had reached such an epidemic that the government needed to bring in DDT to get rid of them”.
David Coltart, a lawyer in Bulawayo, opposition senator and minister for education in Mugabe’s cabinet during the government of national unity in 2009-13, describes Mnangagwa as one of the architects of the massacre.
In his book The Struggle Continues he documents how under Mnangagwa the CIO provided lists of members of the rival party Zapu that the Fifth Brigade would go after. He quotes him warning in a speech in April 1983: “Woe unto those who will choose the path of collaboration with dissidents, for we will certainly shorten their stay on earth.”...
A guerrilla fighter at the age of 16, Mnangagwa narrowly escaped a death sentence for helping to blow up a Rhodesian train. After taking a law degree, he became a commander in the liberation movement and was trained in China. He has been at Mugabe’s side for 50 years, first as his bodyguard and personal assistant and then, after independence, as minister of justice, state security and defence and Speaker of parliament. He has long seen himself as the heir apparent, sidelining rivals such as his fellow vice-president Joice Mujuru. When it looked as though he was going to lose everything to the first lady, Grace Mugabe, his close friend General Constantine Chiwenga, the head of the army, made his move, launching a coup that Mnangagwa is widely believed to have orchestrated.
It’s not just Gukurahundi that concerns Coltart but also Mnangagwa’s role in the 2008 presidential election, when he orchestrated a wave of deadly violence and intimidation that forced the opposition MDC to pull out of a run-off vote that Mugabe risked losing. Coltart says he helped rig the last elections too....
Not only is the new president the most feared man in Zimbabwe but he is also reputed to be the richest. “He is the wealthiest man in the country,” said Tendai Biti, a former finance minister and an opposition leader.
How he acquired that wealth is a matter of great speculation. His business interests include a chain of petrol stations, ethanol production and gold panning. Eyebrows were raised when, in his inauguration speech, he called for an end to corruption. “As we focus on recovering our economy, we must shed misbehaviours and acts of indiscipline, which have characterised the past,” he said....
After all the euphoria of the past 12 days, some Zimbabweans are starting to wonder if they have been fooled. “It’s a Zanu-PF squabble we allowed ourselves to be sucked into,” said Shari Eppel, director of the Solidarity Peace Trust and one of the authors of the Gukurahundi report. “It was never about a return to democracy. I feel people en masse are succumbing to Stockholm syndrome, mistaking their captors for liberators,” she warned as she watched people hug soldiers and praise the army, which launched the coup that led to Mugabe’s resignation. “The army are not our friends and liberators. They never have been and never will be, particularly in this area.”
Gukurahundi - “the early rain that washes away the chaff” - was, in the words of Simon Allison in this piece in the Zambian Mail and Guardian, "the original sin upon which Mugabe’s authoritarian regime was founded". And Mnangagwa played a critically important role.
This is no liberation, clearly. One tyrant has been replaced by another - very possibly worse - tyrant. Mugabe was grooming his wife Grace for the presidency, which Mnangagwa had assumed would be his. And now he's seized his chance, in what is, in effect, a palace coup within the upper echelons of the ruling Zanu-PF.
Business as usual, in other words, for post-colonial Africa.
Comments