"Blow, winds, blow!" (c) Dan Wylie |
In the
meanwhile, anyone who has any kind of historical consciousness will be neither
surprised by Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s ouster, nor particularly utopian about the
immediate future. We have to be grateful that it has happened with minimal
bloodshed and public upheaval, while recognising that the coup consists of
little more than a shuffle amongst the incumbent stalwarts of the party.
Emmerson Mnangagwa has been the staunchest securocrat of them all, the
organiser-in-chief behind the suppression of ZAPU and the Ndebele from even
before 1980, more viciously in the 1980s, including the Entumbeni clashes of
1980-81, and the massacres of Gukurahundi (his denials notwithstanding), the
serially rigged elections. His recently announced cabinet does not have a man
in it under the age of 65; despite their pragmatic noises since the coup, this
doesn’t feel like a team that is going to radically change direction to reboot
production, resolve the cash crisis, open up genuine reconciliatory dialogues
to address the buried past, or transition smoothly to truly transparent
electoral democracy. We can but wait and see.
Meanwhile,
I share the national delight that at least RGM (the Rogue Grand Manipulator)
and his poisonous wife have been sidelined. As it happens, I have been reading
Stuart Doran’s great doorstopper history of ZANU(PF), Kingdom, Power, Glory, which was published before the coup but
offers a densely-documented backdrop to it – especially Mugabe’s willingness to
use violence at any point to gain his ends.
Doran cites Mugabe himself, speaking in 1981:
Our methods will differ according to the situation. If a
situation warrants we use vicious methods, I can assure you that we will use
vicious methods. ... If other people are planning coups, planning revolts, then
let them be warned that we are well prepared for such eventualities. Once
again, if it is to be an eye for an eye, well, we will remove two eyes for one
eye. (Doran, p.270)
Talk
about being hoist with one’s own realpolitik
petard! It is only too ironic that Mugabe’s deposition, for which he seemed
wholly unprepared, happened so
non-violently – not the norm amongst the world’s tyrants. There has to be some
psychological link between tyranny and short-sightedness – for who, gazing down
the bloodied steppes of history, would dare become one? A sorry outcome would
seem fore-ordained: look at Caesar, Hitler, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Idi Amin,
Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Mengistu – overthrown by outsiders they have provoked
into war, assassinated by trusted brothers, driven into exile... Live by the
sword, etc.
"Et tu, Brute?" (c) Dan Wylie |
It has
often been asserted that Mugabe had been clinging gamely and lamely onto power
because he is afraid of being hauled up before such an international court
himself. The question may now be moot, seeing as how his former henchman, now usurper-successor,
Mnangagwa has granted him immunity – though on what divinely-appointed judicial
authority one man can immunise another for mass murder is a perennial mystery. And
one doubts that conscience is much of a driving force amongst such people.
Mugabe will probably, like some other ex-tyrants, die in muffled and luxurious
isolation.
It also
so happened that while the Zimbabwe coup was unfolding I was marking exam scripts
– students responding to a question on Shakespeare’s magical play The Tempest. Nowadays one is pressured
to interpret even such ‘old’ works in a ‘decolonising’ or ‘post-colonial’
context – or be deemed irrelevant, if not white supremacist. Since the story
involves an Italian-European magician, Prospero, taking over an island from its
pair of native inhabitants, Caliban and Ariel, The Tempest is indeed susceptible to such a reading. (Another
colonised islander, Caribbean writer Aimé Cesaire, did just that with his
counter-play, Un Tempête, which our
students also study.)
"Monster/Magician" (c) Dan Wylie |
As I’m
sure many commentators have observed before, Shakespeare was positively obsessed
with the usurpation of kingly or tyrannical power, returning to the theme in
play after play. Hamlet opens
famously with the eponymous hero confronting the ghost of his father, murdered
and usurped by his own brother. Macbeth
strives in vain to atone for his lethal royal sins and avoid being ousted by
his erstwhile lieutenants. Julius Caesar
is assassinated by men he has always known, including even his closest colleague,
Brutus. King Lear (sort of)
voluntarily hands over power to his daughters, but the unexpected consequences
drive him into crazed exile, raging at the storm which is also the upheaval in
his mind. (What a scene: I was immediately provoked into painting tableaus from these plays!) The History plays – all those Henrys – are about little else than the
moral legitimacy or otherwise of kingship, and the mechanisms by which one
ruler takes over from the last. In Henry
V Shakespeare penned the immortal, rightly oft-quoted line about the
fragility of any tyrant’s hold on power:
“Uneasy lies the head that wears the
crown.”
If I
remember right, I first encountered that line as the title of a biography of
King Hussein of Jordan. Anyone – decolonised or otherwise – who argues that
Shakespeare is irrelevant or passé has either never truly read him, or is too
narrow-minded to understand. Few writers are more incisively observant about
those psychological blind-spots that make the lust for power both so dangerous
and so fragile.
In
contemplating these commonalities of human political behaviour, the patterns
that go on repeating themselves, century after dispiriting century, I always
find myself going back to another doorstopper book, St Augustine’s City of God, written around the year
400:
Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of
criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? ... If
this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralised that it
acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues peoples, it
then arrogates to itself the title of kingdom, which is conferred on it in the
eyes of the world, not by the renouncing of aggression but by the attainment of
impunity. (IV.5.4)
Augustine
had your measure, RGB, 1700 years ago. Please read the script, Emmerson.
***
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