Undiplomatic denialism
Mbeki’s selective Mugabe memory
● Within hours of Robert Mugabe’s death, the news trended on local, regional and international channels CNN, BBC and Sky News, and on social media.
It is hard to think of any other African leader who attracted as much controversy and attention. Not even his contemporary, and nemesis, Nelson Mandela, was debated with such polarity.
There were the genuine grievers, his family and others close to him. Apologists and hagiographers provided outpourings of grief; angry and bitter critics exuded revulsion, hate, and horror stories.
There were also neutrals and thoughtful analysts. Some came up with reflective analyses of his chequered past, trying to understand the critical juncture when Mugabe lost the plot and when it all went wrong, having started as an astute liberation struggle nationalist.
While people have different perspectives and views on Mugabe, everyone agreed that the beginning of his career was different from the end. He was headhunted by Zimbabwean nationalists to join the struggle in 1960 and toppled by his closest allies in 2017.
South African political leaders, from President Cyril Ramaphosa to EFF leader Julius Malema and former president Thabo Mbeki, were in the debate.
Mbeki, after attending Mugabe’s funeral in Harare, grabbed the attention from Malema.
Malema visited the Mugabe family in Harare and fired a broadside at Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s fight with the family over Mugabe’s body. But Mbeki, addressing a packed Durban City
Hall where the ANC was commemorating Mugabe’s life, caused a bigger stir.
Mbeki, despite his sophistication and experience, reduced himself to a Mugabe praise singer, delivering a hagiography of Churchillian proportions, designed to serve a political agenda. “He [Mugabe] was a great patriot, a defender of Africa’s independence, a defender of Africa’s interests. He was very principled and very brave. He was able to speak out in defence of those [African] interests,” Mbeki said.
Mbeki then tackled geopolitics, lashing out at Western countries, saying Britain and the US in particular wanted to oust Mugabe. Mbeki was a mediator in Zimbabwe’s political crisis of 2008, a time of hyperinflation with the economy in meltdown.
He turned to relations between Mugabe and the ANC. Basically he said Mugabe was an ANC ally and worked well with it. It was brazen revisionism.
Mbeki’s sloppy and effusive narrative of Mugabe’s relations with the ANC would have had the late Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) leader Joshua Nkomo, his deputy Jason Ziyaphapha Moyo and commanders of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (Zipra) John Dube (real name Sotsha Ngwenya), Akim Ndlovu and Dumiso Dabengwa turning in their graves.
Oliver Tambo, Mandela, Joe Modise, Chris Hani and Archibald Mncedisi Sibeko (also known as Zola
Zembe or Zola Ntambo) must also be turning in theirs.
They would not have agreed that Mugabe was their ally. Certainly not Mandela, who condemned Mugabe for a “tragic failure of leadership”. Zapu was an ally of the ANC and Zipra fought alongside Umkhonto we Sizwe in the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns.
The first ANC/MK military operation with Zipra, through the Luthuli Detachment, was the Wankie campaign in 1967 into then Rhodesia. A number of battles were fought by Zipra/MK against Rhodesian and South African forces. Modise and Hani were involved. Their mission was twofold: Zipra wanted to establish bases in Rhodesia while MK would embark on a long march against SA.
This was not to be. Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith roped in his South African counterpart, John Vorster, for reinforcements to counter the guerrillas.
MK fought with Zipra all the way from the north and north west of Zimbabwe down to the west and to the south. They reached the Beitbridge area and established their main base at Zezani on the Mzingwane River. Then came the ceasefire in 1979/80.
Mugabe took over and began cracking down on Zapu, arresting its leaders and Zipra commanders, heralding the Gukurahundi massacres. He gave MK short shrift and booted it out of Zimbabwe back to Zambia where ANC and Zapu were based. That set the fight against apartheid years back.
Mbeki was sent by Tambo to talk to Mugabe about possible military co-operation. Mugabe refused.
Mbeki claimed in Durban that Mugabe had agreed to work with the ANC, but secretly. Later Mugabe began hounding the ANC and MK in Zimbabwe, allowing them only a nominal presence. It was in line with his policy of offering only political and diplomatic support and not what the ANC needed most — military bases and material.
The ANC’s chief representative in Zimbabwe and MK commander, Joe Gqabi, was killed in Harare amid conspiracy.
The truth is that Mugabe collaborated with the apartheid regime. His first direct interaction with Pretoria came on January 21 1980 when he sent his deputy, Simon Muzenda, and Maurice Nyagumbo to meet the South African mission chief in Harare, Piet van Vuuren, to negotiate a peaceful coexistence and trade relations.
Another meeting was held in February 1980, followed by others. Mugabe later sent Mnangagwa, then his closest ally, to meet apartheid leaders and generals to seal arrangements, according to documents declassified this week in Pretoria and London. This was revealed by Professor Timothy Scarnecchia, associate professor at Kent State University, in an academic paper titled “Rationalizing Gukurahundi: Cold War and South African Foreign Relations with Zimbabwe, 1981-83”, who first reported on the declassified documents.
Dabengwa spoke on this issue to MK veterans in Johannesburg in March shortly before his death. He was clear: Mugabe refused to help.
Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) was more aligned to the Pan Africanist Congress. This poisoned relations between the ANC and Zanu. That’s why efforts for joint operations between MK and the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army failed.
The underlying agenda in Mbeki’s ahistorical address was to consolidate his pan-African credentials, eulogise Mugabe and justify his own Zimbabwe diplomacy, while pushing back Tony Blair, British prime minister at the time, and then US president George Bush.
His assertion that Mugabe delayed land reform to help ANC-apartheid regime negotiations is largely true, but it is a convenient smokescreen. Mbeki’s address was revisionist and self-serving. Mugabe was no hero of SA’s struggle.