Zimbabwe’s Accidental Triumph
IN the midst of a wave of post-election political violence in Zimbabwe in 2008, Brian James, a white farmer who had been evicted from his property years earlier during President Robert Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned lands, found himself surrounded by a throng of black Zimbabweans in downtown Mutare, my hometown. The 50-strong crowd danced, sang and chanted political slogans for more than 20 minutes before Mr. James was finally able to raise his hand, thank them for their support and announce that he was honored to have been elected mayor of the country’s third-largest city.
This Sunday is the 30th anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence from white rule and President Mugabe’s rise to power. Back then, Mr. Mugabe was hailed as a liberator and conciliator. “If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend,” he told nervous whites at the time. For a long while he was true to his word. By the mid-1990s, Zimbabwe had become one of the most stable and prosperous countries in Africa.
But in 2000, within weeks of losing a constitutional referendum to entrench his power, Mr. Mugabe began the catastrophic land invasions that resulted in the eviction of almost all the country’s 4,500 white farmers and the ruin of what was once a model post-colonial African country. Ever since, the narrative of Zimbabwe has been one of race. Rare is the speech in which Mr. Mugabe does not rail against whites, colonialists, imperialists or the West. Members of his ZANU-PF party have spoken of a “Rwandan solution” for Zimbabwe’s whites.
Westerners have simply accepted this narrative of blacks and whites pitted against one another. But, in doing so, they have missed the inspiring story of what has actually been happening in Zimbabwe over the past decade. After years of mass unemployment, mutant inflation, chronic shortages and state violence, Zimbabweans simply don’t care about skin color. In fact, Mr. Mugabe has managed to achieve the exact opposite of what he set out to do in 2000: the forging of a postracial state.
Brian James’s story, taken in full, stands as proof of Mr. Mugabe’s unwitting accomplishment. Mr. James was barely interested in politics before losing his land in 2003 — “I just wanted to farm and play cricket on weekends” — but afterward he joined the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, quickly rose through the ranks and was elected mayor by a virtually all-black constituency.
And Mr. James is not a singular example. One of the most popular politicians in the country is Roy Bennett, another former farmer, known to his legion of black supporters as Pachedu, “one of us.” When Mr. Bennett was arrested on trumped-up treason charges last year, hundreds of black Zimbabweans surrounded the prison so that intelligence agents would not be able to smuggle him out to a more remote location where it was feared he might be tortured.
Then there is the inspiring sight of white farmers, who have been contesting the legality of the land expropriations in a regional human rights tribunal, marching into court arm in arm with their black lawyers, often dynamic women who know the laws and Constitution of the land better than those sitting in judgment. This belies Mr. Mugabe’s image of a country divided by race.
My parents, owners of a backpacker resort, are part of this new Zimbabwe. Like most whites, they once steered clear of politics. But in 2002, when their home came under siege, my father joined the M.D.C. By 2005, their lodge had become a meeting place for black political dissidents who would disguise themselves as priests to avoid detection by Mr. Mugabe’s militia.
In 2008, the lodge became a safe house for three black activists, Pishai Muchauraya, Prosper Mutseyami and Misheck Kagurabadza, who had won seats in Mugabe strongholds and were now on the run from government death squads. My mother, as tough-as-nails a white African as any, still gets emotional when she talks of the courage of her three “fugitives,” all of whom are now friends and in Parliament, part of the fractious national unity government set up between Mr. Mugabe and the M.D.C. in 2009.
Mr. Mugabe knows exactly what he is doing in constantly invoking race-based rhetoric. By framing the crisis in Zimbabwe as a struggle against the West — against the white world — he escapes censure from other postcolonial African leaders who understand their own countries’ histories in the same way. And when the West allows Mr. Mugabe’s narrative to go unchallenged, it plays right into his hands.
Overlooked in the racial invective are some basic and important facts. Mr. Mugabe has accused white farmers of being colonial-era “settlers,” but about 70 percent of them actually purchased their land after independence, with signed permission from Mr. Mugabe himself. And far from owning 70 percent of the land in the country, as was widely believed, those white farmers owned only half of our commercial land — just 14 percent of Zimbabwe’s total land. With that land, however, they used to produce more than 60 percent of all agricultural crops, and 50 percent of all foreign earnings. One only has to look at the decline in food production and collapse of the economy since 2000 to appreciate how vital white farmers were to the well-being of the nation.
All but ignored was the other major target of the land grabs: black farm workers. Some 300,000 blacks were employed on white farms up until 2000 — two million people, if one counts their dependents — and they overwhelmingly supported the M.D.C. By destroying white farms, Mr. Mugabe wiped out a major base of black opposition. It is hardly surprising, then, that black workers often stood with white employers to resist Mr. Mugabe’s violent invaders. When has that ever happened in post-colonial Africa?
I am often asked by friends in the United States if there is any hope for Zimbabwe, and I always answer yes. Then I tell them a story about a funeral.
Not long before he was elected mayor, Brian James lost his wife, Sheelagh, in a car crash in Mutare. Her funeral was held on the lawns of the local golf club and 300 mourners turned up, among them white farmers, black friends and an M.D.C. choir. The day before the funeral, my father was with Pishai Muchauraya, the former M.D.C. fugitive and soon-to-be member of Parliament, when he received a phone call from the leader of the choir. They had a problem, they told Mr. Muchauraya: they had never been to the funeral of a white woman before and did not know what to sing.
“What’s that got to do with it?” Mr. Muchauraya snapped. “Mrs. James was an African just like you. Sing what you normally sing.” When he turned to apologize for the interruption, he saw my father had tears in his eyes.
