Africanism: good for Africa? will new leadership emerge?

A time comes in the life of any institution or society when, for it to move forward, someone has to go. Until that person has exited, whether voluntarily or not, nothing can happen; not only is progress blocked, but decline is inexorable and inevitable. Such is the case with Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president since 1980, and now, after the recent election, hoping to last through to 2008, which he well might, since power seems to lend dictators longevity.

The need to remove these leadership obstacles to economic, social, and political progress is characteristic of the recent history of democracy in Africa: Consider Abacha in Nigeria, Mobutu in Zaire, Moi still in Kenya, and increasingly Sam Nujoma in Namibia. The energies of entire nations are focused on getting rid of old, ineffective, and stubborn autocrats, ruling long past their "sell-by" date. Even when it occurs, their removal may come too late. The damage they have inflicted is irreparable or, if everything goes well, it will take at least a generation to repair. A perfect example is the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By the time Mobutu left, the damage was complete. A priest who has given his life to Zimbabwe and knows it thoroughly stunned me recently with the observation that even if there were political change, it might not be possible to rebuild because the social, economic, and political depredations were, in his view, far more serious than people realized.

Why then does President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa support Mugabe? Mbeki's utterances, designed to placate his critics, have ranged from the supportive to the mildly wrist-slapping. The South African observer group sent to monitor the recent elections in Zimbabwe was chosen to echo its master's voice in Pretoria. Mbeki, unlike the classic lawyer-leader, is an economist who ought to understand that Mugabe is ruining his country's economy and creating political instability in the entire Southern African region. But there is a logic in this lunacy. The first strand of it is ideological. Mbeki and Mugabe come out of the same left-wing liberation tradition. Both fought the same colonial system. They are comrades in arms. That Mugabe would want to clear whites off farms and resettle them with rural black people is something that Mbeki, in his University of Sussex-trained mind, might regard as crazy. In his struggle-honed, Marxist-formed heart, however, he might find it acceptable, perhaps even desirable. To the Western observer, the farm occupations may give Mugabe the appearance of a poor man's Pol Pot or an even poorer man's Stalin--the wild and discredited notion that one can solve an economic and political problem in one fell swoop of social engineering. To the struggle mentality, such a move may be seen as bold, daring, and dashing. Perhaps Mbeki is like the Roman spectator watching his favorite gladiator doing what he would have neither the capacity nor the courage to do.

Ironically, this Marxist and therefore originally non-African strand of ideology meshes conveniently with the Africanism which is such an important part of the African National Congress's (ANC) tradition. Mbeki's "I am an African" speech (May 8, 1996) is an eloquent and subtle articulation of this tradition. Furthermore, the ANC always has to make sure it keeps this tradition at a boil, lest the more radically Africanist Pan African Congress outdo it in Africanism.

The events in Zimbabwe have demonstrated how easy it is in Southern Africa to portray social reality as a class struggle--the white, colonial overlords versus the black underclass, the urban black stooges of Western capitalism versus the children of the soil. There is much in this. The amount of land owned by white commercial farmers is vast; that occupied by black subsistence farmers is, per capita, pathetic. This is true of South Africa as well as Zimbabwe. The names on the gates of South African farms are mostly Afrikaans, except in KwaZulu-Natal where they are English and Scottish. In other words, the Marxist class struggle of industrial proletariat against capitalist becomes re-interpreted in black and white, Africa against the colonizing West. A luta continua! (the struggle continues!) as the Mozambican slogan has it.

Another aspect of the ANC and Mbeki's Africanism is intellectual, a conscious stance that systematically questions the Western perspective on reality. Does hiv cause aids? Western medicine says so and prescribes expensive Western antiretroviral drugs as a way of slowing the illness and preventing mother-to-child infection. The Africanist intellectual in Mbeki will at least question this. When former president Jimmy Carter, recently visiting South Africa, stated his belief in antiretrovirals, he was lambasted in the press by the ANC, an attack which may have been authorized by Mbeki himself. The West says that the Zimbabwean elections were seriously flawed; the Organization of African Unity says they were fine. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sees Mugabe as an election thief; for the Africanist Mugabe is a great and powerful chief taking on the lackeys of colonialism.

To the Western eye an African city may seem dirty, chaotic and noisy. Not so; the Africanist's description of it is colorful, harmonious, and vibrant. The African renaissance may use a word from European history but its real meaning is found more in the slogan mayibuye iAfrika!: "May Africa return!" The phrase expresses the desire that the continent will achieve not only an economic comeback and political independence, but also a cultural zenith, in which Africa and her traditions, values, and mores can at last walk tall after a long dark night of economic and intellectual slavery.

This Africanist response is born of the repeated experience of being told what to do by others as well as how to think. An unfortunate element of sheer contrariness can come into this discourse, so that the issue becomes not what is said but rather who said it. Not that this reaction is unknown in other cultures.

A third strand of the ideological weave is a particular view of history: only the party which led the armed struggle is worthy to lead the country; others are ipso facto excluded. That is the line of Zimbabwe's ruling party. It is a convenient form of political excommunication. Not only are Zimbabwean whites not considered worthy of a political say because they were on the wrong side, even the Ndebele, the minority tribe that ran its own liberation movement under Joshua Nkomo, are considered heretics. This would never be admitted publicly, but Mugabe's violent suppression of Ndebele "dissidents" in the early eighties illustrated the point in blood.

One of the possibly unintended effects of this view of history is that it has excluded the young. The generation in Zimbabwe who refer to themselves as the "born frees," especially the educated urban youngsters just out of higher education, take one look at the ugly gerontocracy mismanaging the country and opt to leave to seek their fortune in the land of the old colonial masters, Britain.

The political logic is a little more byzantine, but also makes sense from Mbeki's point of view. Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change is an unlikely alliance between a disaffected ethnic group (the Ndebele), white business interests, and black trade unions. Tsvangirai himself was the country's trade union leader. For Mbeki and the ANC, there is political risk in allowing such an alliance to succeed in a neighboring country. What if the potentially disaffected ethnic party (the Zulu-dominated Inkatha, led by Chief Buthelezi) got together with the hugely influential and powerful white business interests and managed to persuade the unions to break with the ANC? It could mean the beginning of the end of the ANC. Not that this is likely any time soon, but, with some bad economic luck and continuing high unemployment in South Africa, it could happen.

On the wider front of regional politics, it obviously makes sense not to antagonize Robert Mugabe if he is going to be your neighbor for the next six years. At least Mbeki got that right. It was clear that Mugabe was not going to take chances with the presidential election. But more widely still, there exists a left-leaning, geopolitical comfort zone in the Southern African region, of which Mbeki is part. Messrs. Nujoma in Namibia, Dos Santos in Angola, Mugabe, Mbeki, and Chissano in Mozambique are a like-minded club who can do business, or at least line up for a smiling group photo at meetings of regional heads of states. The situation is congenial and convenient. Why would one want to spoil the party by letting in someone who is not quite our type?

Well, as Bill Clinton said, "It's the economy, stupid!" That is my sentiment entirely after spending the latter half of last year in Zimbabwe as inflation climbed to over 100 percent, the economy shrank by some 8 percent, and unemployment stood at 60 percent. But in the wake of Mugabe's victory, with the businessmen saying how bad it all is for South Africa's economy, the ANC is clearly still staying the Africanist course. Jill Marcus, a South African government spokeswoman, says that since the Zimbabwean economy is so small compared to South Africa's, the effects will not be so bad. She is clearly disingenuous in downplaying the economic "contamination" factor, that is, that my neighbor's problems spell problems for me. Contamination is a particularly potent force in the African context because the rest of the world tends to believe that the heart of darkness is alive and well where it has always lived, in Africa. With the New Economic Partnership for African Development requiring vast investments from the West, such perceptions are expensive for Africa.

Time will tell what effect the inevitable economic spillover and contamination from Zimbabwe will have on Mbeki, whether the Africanist-Marxism of his Moscow days will give way to the economic realism of his Sussex sojourn. The immediate crisis of the Zimbabwe elections has passed, but the danger of being pulled down by the drowning man is still real. South African history might yet repeat Zimbabwe's, as yet another embattled African leader who ought to go clings stubbornly to power, while all around him things fall apart.

Chris Chatteris, S.J., teaches homiletics and philosophy of education at Saint Joseph's Theological Institute in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.