A quite lengthy book review I did on Heidi Holland’s “psycho-biography” of Zimbabwean “President” Robert Mugabe, Dinner with Mugabe, was just published in the newly established Abu Dhabi-based, English language newspaper, The National (kind of an Al Jazeera English of print in the Middle East).
The title of the book, refers to Holland’s first fateful meeting with Mugabe in 1975 in Salisbury, where she worked as magazine editor. She arranged for a lawyer friend to meet Mugabe secretly at her suburban home. Over dinner Mugabe said little, but impressed Holland nonetheless: driving Mugabe to the train station after the meeting (his ride had failed to materialize), Holland left her small son asleep alone in the house. The next day, Mugabe called to check that the child was OK.
Since then, Holland (who had moved to South Africa) watched as Mugabe went from liberation hero to tyrant. The book ends with Holland interviewing Mugabe again at his presidential office in 2007. Quite a coup given that Mugabe rarely grants interviews to foreign (especially white) journalists. Holland’s interview, despite the hype, however, does not offer us much new information or analysis.
Nevertheless, Holland covers a lot of ground in the book. Mugabe’s roots, his rise to power, violence as political culture in Zimbabwe and, crucially, why so few in the West said or did anything when Zimbabwean government forces murdered 20,000 Ndebeles in what amounted to an ethnic purge between 1982 and 1987.
Here’s an excerpt from my review of Holland’s book:
“… One of the legacies of that time – and a testament of the power of the nationalist narrative that African independence leaders embodied – is that few if any of Mugabe’s present Western critics publicly denounced these murders. Instead he received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 1994 and honorary degrees from American universities. The economy was growing steadily even in the hostile shadow of Apartheid South Africa and access to education and health services markedly improved. As Lord Corrington, the British foreign secretary during independence negotiations, tells Holland: “But other than the killing of the Ndebele, it went tolerably well under Mugabe at first, didn’t it? He wasn’t running a fascist state. He didn’t appear to be a bad dictator.”
The full review here
Sean, that’s a very interesting review. I’ve heard a lot about the book here: I’ve never met Heidi Holland but everyone knows her and expresses surprise when I say I don’t know her… ‘But she knows allll the foreign journalists!’ I’m afraid that rather put me off: foreign journalists in Africa tend to the ghastly (and I should know being one of them, if on the periphery). But her book definitely sounds worth reading.
Your blog, btw, is prolific. I’m a great admirer. Keep going.
Can I add something else? And please, help me with an answer Sean. I went through a phase of thinking ‘anything would be better, right now, than Mugabe, ergo Tsvangirai would be better. But I think we have to seriously doubt that given the extent of his sponsorship from the US and UK, the latter which has shown itself to be such a dangerous ‘ally’ in Africa. Is Tsvangirai really any better? Or could he not take Zimbabwe backwards even further (in the long run perhaps), his hands tied to Western desire? Does the desire (and need) to get rid of Mugabe overshadow everything else? Or would this be a case of not learning from the mistakes of the past? I think I veer to the latter. At the moment there is no easy solution. Mugabe must go. But must Tsvangirai enter the centre stage instead? I hope not.
On your first comment: her guest house in Jozi is a favorite among foreign correspondents I understand.
On the second: I think that’s a debate that is put on the back burner (like everywhere else, including when it came up in SA when the odorous National Party was politically defeated). For me, the best take on questions of how to delink the tendency to create wealth through the state (i.e. where capturing the state is about wealth creation for a new class of rulers who now speak for the people, think BEE in SA or as you document well, Dos Santos in Angola or the current Frelimo in Moz), is the work of Zimbabwean scholar Brian Raftopoulos (now based in SA). There should be references on the web. There’s also a book from a conference organized on questions about post-liberation and post-nationalism by the NAI in Sweden edited by Namibian Henning Melber that I think ask some of these questions. And of course there are the writings of Western-based intellectuals like John Saul and Richard Peete (he has a nice paper, at times too theoretical) on SA in Antipode a while ago which I just reread on the beach yesterday.