We got inspired by Dinizulu Mbikokayise Macaphulana as he wrote this mindblowing article. We are sure you too can be challengedby the realities in it.
IN these last days of Robert Mugabe, to think of
the Zimbabwean polity and economy is to confront
crises, disasters and calamities. What is visible to
even the uncircumcised is the crushing cash
crunch, increasing poverty of the masses,
infrastructural disrepair and the scarcity of life
itself. These obvious disasters and calamities have
arrested our collective attention the way the
undulating colours of the python captivate a
doomed animal that is about to be squeezed and
swallowed whole by the monstrous predator.
In the ruling party and the political opposition, the
past weeks have seen a spectacular display of
numbers and crowds that support the
organisations. In apparent wisdom, at long last,
some political entities have even been forging
coalitions. Parties and politicians have been keen
to show some muscle, fire some warning shots in
preparation for 2018 elections that in my view will
never come because for now the future of
Zimbabwe is in the past. Behind the economic and
political chaos and the spectacular crowds that the
parties and politicians have been flaunting in the
streets is concealed a looming civil war.
From where I stand, some of the signs of our
present and coming times have been small but
significant events that passed much unanalyzed and
undebated as mundane and insignificant in the light
of the weighty matters of the day such as the
shortage of food and the scarcity of cash. Robert
Mugabe’s beating heart and the pumping lungs are
presently the fragile string that is keeping the
silence that we mistake for peace and stability in
the country that is about to explode into Africa’s
most volatile trouble spot. All the economic and
political ingredients of a bloody civil war are
present in current Zimbabwe whose explosion is,
this time, likely to destabilise Mozambique, South
Africa, Botswana and Zambia as immediate
neighbhours.
The Head of State and the State of his Head
Many were shocked but not entirely surprised, when
recently at Independence Day celebrations, the 92
year old ruler bowed down in worship and
veneration to his own picture. For Robert Mugabe,
the country and its history together with its destiny
and future are summarised in him, the country is
himself and he is the country. Increasingly, he sees
himself in ecclesiastic terms as the ultimate
sacrament and living symbol of the country.
In Robert Mugabe’s troubling mental universe, every
Zimbabwean owes him not support or gratitude to a
leader but patriotism, because he is the Motherland
and Fatherland combined and personified. Africa,
because Mugabe used to be a Pan-Africanist,
Zimbabwe as Mugabe used to be a nationalist and
ZANU-PF as Mugabe was once a party leader have
all come to an end, his mental and psychological
world has collapsed and narrowed to himself and
his very small but powerful family. Mugabeism as a
political system and organizing ideology has
replaced all passions and drives that once occupied
the life and the times of Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
In bowing to worship his own portrait Robert
Mugabe was not simply being the decorated
narcissist that he has always been but he was
wishfully demonstrating what he wants every wise
Zimbabwean to do, worship the leader. In a way,
the Mugabe of flesh was personally passing on the
power to the Mugabe the symbol and object as an
idol of worship. In the symbolic universe, the
portrait as a sign succeeds and replaces Robert
Mugabe the person and a personalized religious
cult of the person is inaugurated. The big continent
of Africa, the nation of Zimbabwe, the party, and the
tribe that all used to be important to Robert
Mugabe have at last given way to a religious and
political personalism centred in the Man and his
family. For himself and his family, the Man is ready
to set alight the party, the tribe, the country and
even the continent.
Most of us saw but did not really read the
photograph of an ancestral looking Robert Mugabe
seated down with Bona’s bouncing baby in his
arms. Present in the picture, smilling and looking
over are Bona herself and Grace Mugabe. Absent in
the picture is the father of the baby. In Robert
Mugabe’s life, fathers have always been absent
presences. Robert Mugabe has been a big Mama’s
baby all his life. In his slender but important
psychoanalytical narrative, Christopher Hope dared
to describe Robert Mugabe as a big woman inside
a very small man. The baby, in the ancestor’s arms
looked like many things including a little angel that
in its innocence taunts and accuses an old and
dying devil, a future taunting a defeated past. The
baby also looked like a small but meaningful
accusation to the hands that carried it, the hands
that have had many babies of other mothers
smashed against rocks for being children of
dissidents. Innocence looks drowning in fresh and
old blood in those hands. That baby also looks
powerful and overcoming. In its tiny frame it exudes
power and spirit. The reason why the Robert
Mugabe who openly boasted of degrees in violence,
and that the X of the vote cannot argue with the
bullet of the gun is recently demanding that the
politics must come before the gun, is exactly that,
baby power. In carrying that baby, Robert Mugabe
was carrying himself once again as a baby who has
learnt many bloody lessons. The old crocodile, from
another angle, looks ready to swallow the baby but
it can’t swallow itself, it can only look and die
inside. The baby is the only successor that Robert
Mugabe, no matter how dangerous cannot harm.
The powerful mothers, Robert Mugabe’s own
mother Bona, and Bona’s own mother Grace are
looking over. The past belongs to Robert, the future
to babies and the mothers. In a strong way he
looks perfectly unwanted in that picture whose
ceremonial effect is both a welcome and a
goodbye. In Robert Mugabe’s present absence,
what should Zimbabweans do?
The Power of the Libidinal Economy
Frantz Fanon and Sigmund Freud as psychoanalysts
and social scientists are importantly usable in
reading the long political journey and present tragic
condition of Robert Mugabe. In his life Robert
Mugabe has managed to prevent his party’s
factions from engaging in open violent civil war by
keeping himself firm as the leader of all the
factions and playing the gladiators against each
other while carefully eliminating all dangers to
himself. As life inevitably leaves him or as he
inevitably leaves life, open and violent warfare will
be inevitable, soon.
Sigmund Freud’s powerful concept of the pulls of
the libidinal economy is amplified and enhanced in
the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard who in 1974
explained the interface between economics, micro-
politics of desire and power. In that exposition,
“libidinal investments” and or investments of the
libido, one’s family and organisation, products of
the libido become the most powerful drive and
passion in life. At the end of the long day of one’s
troubled life where the world, the nation and
pleasure have been important, the self and the
family are the last temple. The family becomes
one’s “object of libido” while the self becomes
narcissistically the “ego-libido.” That sorry and very
sad picture of Robert Mugabe at long last hugging
onto his baby grandson while his daughter and wife
look on becomes an important and powerful
simulacrum that represents how he has become a
powerless prisoner of the libidinal economy. At 92,
Robert Mugabe is psychologically back at the lap of
the mother. He risks being swallowed back by the
power of motherhood. At the point of death, he is
closest once again to the point and site of birth,
and at that point Robert Mugabe has become even
more dangerous than he has ever been. Picture a
baby who commands an army and must urgently
protect his mother from everything in the world that
could harm her.
Using the Ivory Coast and greater African continent
as case study, Frantz Fanon described the “pitfalls
of national consciousness.” Because of the
“intellectual laziness” of the African political elite
and economic middleclass, nationalism as a
unifying ideology collapses into being a divisive and
toxic force. The Dear Leader of the people comes
into power talking about African unity and the vision
of Pan-Africanism in the entire continent. Soon
enough the leader forgets about Africa except in
occasional slogans and begins to talk about the
country, his country. Soon enough, he begins to talk
not about the country but the party, his party. Before
anyone notices, Fanon demonstrates, the Dear
Leader has turned his tribe into the nation and the
party, all other tribes and parties are declared
enemies and sell outs as the leader becomes more
chauvinistic and genocidal. He becomes a tribalist,
a xenophobe and a racist of proportions. Finally, in
the tragic cycle of degeneration, the last thing that
the Dear Leader does, Frantz Fanon explains, is to
abandon the tribe, the party, the nation and the
continent, and think only of “ his small little family.”
The family and its fortunes become the country and
the continent. The Dear Leader himself becomes the
party and the tribe combined and he demands,
violently, all the patriotism that the population can
give. What can be added to Frantz Fanon’s erudite
exposition is that the Dear Leader stops being a
person and becomes a symbol and a system, an
idol that worships itself and demands to be
worshiped. The leader becomes what, in the
observation of Jean Baudrillard, the French
semiotician, is described as “a photocopy without
an original” a fake object that is more powerful than
the original object, and worships its own power as
a personal private religion. In all the ways, Robert
Mugabe has personified the tragic Fanonian
nationalist who degenerates from a Pan-Africanist to
a nationalist, from nationalist to a genocidal
partisan tribalist, and finally becomes a pathetic
family man who thinks his family is the world. What
Zimbabweans in the ruling party and the political
opposition are faced with right now is a prisoner of
the libidinal economy and a dangerous fallen
nationalist who is prepared to destroy the whole
world in the interest of his family and its fortunes.
The Civil War in Zimbabwe
Already, a civil war is raging in Zimbabwe, only that
it is still contained in angry words and secret
stratagems and plots in the dark cold nights of
Harare and the world’s capitals. Three powerful
groupings, all with access to arms and money and
all backed by different international players are
jostling. The warring factions are led, one by Robert
Mugabe himself but fronted by his energetic and
scared wife. The other group is led by Joice Mujuru
but fronted by the name and symbol of the late
Solomon Mujuru whose boys in the army, police
and the intelligence are bleeding and angry at the
elimination of the General. The so called Lacoste
group is led by Emmerson Mnangagwa and fronted
by a multitude of old and angry war veterans. All
these three groups are dangerous and control many
armed men and women in the army, the police and
the intelligence. With only a spark, these three
groups will split the national security forces into
three warring armies and the whole country will be
on fire from Mutare to Plumtree and from Binga to
Beitbridge. What looks from the outside like peace
and discipline in the security forces is only silence
that is occasioned by Robert Mugabe’s beating
heart and pumping lungs, his symbolism and the
personality religion that he has inaugurated. Minus
that, these powerful groups that are each richer than
the country in billions of United States Dollars will
go for each other and throw the whole Southern
African region into turmoil any day now. These
groups will not only fight to secure political power
and to save their personal skins but also to secure
their massive ill-gotten fortunes. This is a ticking
African time bomb. Never mind the crowds that are
flaunted in the streets by different political parties,
the civil war in Zimbabwe will be sparked by a
minority of angry and powerful people who operate
in the dark not in rallies. A mixture of anger after
political losses, guilt of crimes against humanity,
lots of money and armed men, the hunger for
political power and fear of losing wealth and going
to jail are rich ingredients for a genocidal civil war.
The Fourth and the Fifth Group
There is a known war in Zimbabwe that was always
going to come from the victims of genocide in
Matabaleland and the Midlands. While pretending
that Gukurahundi was a closed chapter, Robert
Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa have for years
been trying to neutralize the anger and the grief in
Matabaleland and the Midlands. The land reform
programme was used to settle as many people as
possible from Mashonaland provinces in the
Midlands and Matabaleland to seek to dilute the
identity of the populations and make fewer and
fewer those people and communities who directly
experienced Gukurahundi. The naturalisation of the
Shona language as a dominant language in
Matabeleland through teachers and the resettled
new farmers has always been expected to neutralize
and dilute the Matabaleland and Midlands
Gukurahundi memory and consciousness. Slowly,
Robert Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa have
been praying that intermarriages and social
engineering of the populations will completely erase
the communities that saw themselves as
Gukurahundi victims and were angry enough to do
anything about it. Another programme has been to
prop up the other identities within what has been
called the Mthwakazi Nation. The Tongas have been
encouraged to stand up on their own. The Kalangas
too have been energised to seek autonomous
Kalanga nationalism. This has been promoted as
political social engineering to ensure that soon
enough there will be no one who considers him or
herself as authentic Ndebele. Gukurahundi, one day,
would be a genocide without victims, so hoped
Robert Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa in their
guilt and desperation.
Added to the Gukurahundi and marginalisation
grievance in Matabaleland and the Midlands has
been a big and old secret that dates back to Cecil
John Rhodes and King Mzilikazi himself. This secret
is the major reason why as one of the smallest
countries in the world, Zimbabwe remains of
interest even to the mighty super powers. The
secret is the reason why Imperial forces ganged up
against Lobhengula and extinguished the Mthwakazi
Kingdom. In a way, Gukurahundi happened because
of this secret. This is not a Chiadzwa, but one of
the thickest diamond belts that runs from the far
end of Botswana up to the Great Lakes Region. The
angry victims of Gukurahundi are settled on one of
the world’s richest and largest diamond reserves
that has been known and hidden since precolonial
times. When politicians, the few who know, talk
about Zimbabwe’s natural resources they talk of, not
the gold, the wild life and the other minerals but
diamond and platinum reserves in Matabaleland.
For that reason, in addition to the Gukurahundi
victims, Dumiso Dabengwa and ZIPRA-Vets as the
Fourth war-ready group in Zimbabwe, there are
troops of international business tycoons,
mercenaries, black marketeers, and even proxies of
Western and Eastern governments that are waiting
for the slightest excuse to join the scramble for the
rich pickings in that region of Zimbabwe. If a civil
war is allowed to start in Zimbabwe, control of
Matabaleland will be the prime jewel of each group
and its international backers most of whom have
been sending spies as tourists and journalists, and
have been pretending to be small scale businesses
that fish in the Zambezi and mine for sand in the
river banks when they are trying to locate the
heartbeat of diamonds and platinum.
The Political Settlement in Zimbabwe
Given the above, a civil war can very easily explode
in Zimbabwe. For political power, wealth and old
grudges and grievances many powerful
Zimbabweans and their international backers are
ready for war. What all Zimbabweans, in the ruling
regime and opposition should work for is not the
2018 election, but peace and a working economy in
the country. Politicians across the divides should
start mobilising for a political settlement and unity
government under which the economy and the polity
will be mended. Nation building strategies that will
make Zimbabwe into one nation, state building
strategies that will make Zimbabwe’s national
institutions work again are urgently needed. The
friendship and partnership of international backers
must be sought not their interference. Once again,
every family in Zimbabwe should be exalted and
protected, and its future secured in the same way
that Robert Mugabe is doing with his own family.
The time for narrow leadership is up or we all get
swallowed by war and calamity.
Dinizulu Mbikokayise Macaphulana is a
Zimbabwean Political Scientist and Semiotician
who is based in Pretoria:
dinizulumacaphulana@yahoo.com.