ANC - Zanu (PF) 'Revolution'

The similarities between the ANC and Zanu (PF) should not be overlooked in explaining why the ANC has backed President Robert Mugabe for so long.

A recent book on President Robert Mugabe was subtitled ‘the untold story of a freedom fighter who became a tyrant’. ‘Became’? The tyrant has been in Mugabe all along. All that has happened in recent years is that he has reverted to type as his electorate has turned against him.

President Thabo Mbeki has been attacked for turning a blind eye to Mugabe’s ravages, but that is what many Western governments did when he set about liquidating his opponents during the gukurahundi operations in the early 1980s. Expediency dictated that the massacres perpetrated in Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands were swept under the carpet. Mugabe had been key to getting rid of the embarrassing sore of white-ruled Rhodesia, and what he then did to consolidate his power was of little concern.

Nor were governments alone in turning a blind eye. South Africa’s former education minister, Kader Asmal, admitted last October that he should have spoken up ‘when thousands of people were murdered by the infamous Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland’. In Gukurahundi, published last year, Elinor Sisulu wrote of her own silence and that of others about the massacres of the Ndebele. ‘They were,’ she wrote, ‘too enamoured with our great liberation hero.’ One review of Sisulu’s book noted that ‘some non-governmental organisations simply denied the extent of Mugabe’s role’. Some in the church even suppressed reports about what happened.

The number of political opponents and ordinary people done to death between 1980 and 1982 by Mugabe and his North Korean-trained Shona army as he sought to wipe out Joshua Nkomo’s power base has been estimated at 20 000.

Perhaps some of the anger now felt about Mugabe – in the British Labour Party, for example – arises from feelings of guilt and grievance that the liberation hero betrayed those who backed him through thick and thin when they should have known better.

What about the attitude of the African National Congress (ANC)? Mbeki’s penchant for holding hands with Mugabe is not a personal foible, but is symbolic of the ANC’s own support of the man they cheered whenever he flew into town. Though now far more critical of Mugabe than Mbeki ever was, ANC president Jacob Zuma also spoke recently in Germany of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party as a ‘fraternal liberation movement and an ally’.

Since neither the gukurahundi nor Mugabe’s recent behaviour is enough to lose him the friendship of the ANC, it is wise to look more closely at what the ANC and Zanu-PF have in common. The ANC came to power after a decade of political violence in which some 25 000 people, the vast majority of them black, were killed.

The view successfully promoted by the ANC and its supporters in the media and civil society, and among foreign governments, is that the violence was largely the work of the organisation’s opponents in league with security forces controlled by the previous government. Most of these deaths were never probed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) despite the fact that the ANC was committed to a strategy of revolutionary violence and exhibited fierce intolerance for rival organisations. Expediency dictated to the TRC and many others that it was better to sweep the ANC’s role in violence under the carpet, as happened in Zimbabwe.

Zanu-PF ‘hawks’ were recently reported as having told Mugabe it was necessary to ‘defend the revolution’. It is easy to imagine the same words being used by the ANC should it ever face the threat of a reverse at the polls.

South Africa’s handling of the crisis in Zimbabwe is therefore important not only for that country but also for our own democracy. Mbeki backs Mugabe because he sees him as defending his revolution against supposed racists and imperialists. Endorsed by the ANC, this backing has finally turned into an international public relations disaster for the ANC.