Mugabe’s exaltation a betrayal

The noisy blue light convoys and the private jets ferrying African leaders to and from Harare, Zimbabwe, over the past month have now departed.

They came, they sang the praises of the country’s late former president, Robert Mugabe, and they have now left the Zimbabwe of food and fuel shortages behind.

Like the memorial service and the very quiet funeral afterwards, the debates about Mugabe’s legacy fade into the past.

What we cannot ignore, however, are the troubling questions that we Africans must answer given the effusive tributes to Mugabe by some of our political leaders.

The most urgent of those questions is this: do African lives really matter to us Africans and our leaders?

The second is: given the numerous injustices and the massacre that Mugabe presided over in his 37 years in power, how do African leaders wish to remember the 20,000 people killed in Mugabe’s war on his own people in the 1980s?

If we celebrate the perpetrator of these killings, can we prevent another massacre when it comes knocking?

Over the past three weeks we have seen Africa’s new generation leaders, from Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta to our own Cyril Ramaphosa, rush to Harare to sing Mugabe’s praises.

They were accompanied by Mugabe’s contemporaries such as former Ghanaian president Jerry Rawlings.

Mugabe’s passing is a classic case of how the lives of ordinary Africans don’t matter to us except when it is fashionable and it is on public platforms just before an election.

Between 1982 and 1987, Mugabe deployed his North Korea-trained Fifth Brigade in the south and midlands of Zimbabwe to quell fighting between his supporters and those of Joshua Nkomo.

Best estimates are that 20,000 black Zimbabweans were killed in that period.

For some perspective, between 1964 and 1980, when Zimbabweans fought the white supremacist government of Rhodesia, 8,000 black and 468 white civilians were killed.

When we sing Mugabe’s praises what are we saying about the lives of the 20,000 who died in those massacres between 1982 and 1987? Were their lives worthless? Did they not have mothers, fathers, children, lovers or friends?

Does no-one miss them? Do their lives not matter? When we exalt their killer, what do we say about Mugabe’s victims?

How do we preserve their memories?

How do we ensure their massacre is never repeated?

Here is the greatest sin committed by those who have been singing the praises of Mugabe.

They are trying to erase those 20,000 black lives from memory and consciousness.

They are not merely trying to say those lives don’t matter.

They are saying they never existed.

This is how massacres and atrocities are initiated and repeated – we remove all memory of what humans can do to each other and we pretend that this never happened.

Crucially, we tell those who have the instincts and rhetorical power to drive crowds to assault and murder that they can go ahead and do what Mugabe and his ilk have done.

Why? Because they will get away with it.

Because when they die we will dance around their graves and say they are heroes.

Mugabe was prime minister and head of government when 20,000 black Zimbabweans were murdered, in his own country, by his own forces.

I have not even touched on what Mugabe did to black lives in the 2000s.

I was living in London in 2001 when I interviewed hundreds of Zimbabwean professionals – from doctors to legal scholars to nurses to accountants – fleeing political persecution in their homeland.

In 2004, the paper I edited in Johannesburg helped many journalists from newspapers which were shut down and their editors arrested by Mugabe’s military.

Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans are now exiled to SA.

Over the past month, as the Zimbabwe government and Mugabe’s family wrangled over his body, Zimbabweans were going about their daily lives. They were queuing for fuel. They were wondering where the next meal was coming from.

They were wondering if their daughter, trained as a teacher and washing floors in Johannesburg, had been caught up in xenophobic violence.

Meanwhile, inside the stadiums and on expensively decorated podiums, African leaders were effusive in their praise of Mugabe.

The ordinary Zimbabweans whose lives have been destroyed by Mugabe didn’t much matter to them.

Crucially, they have erased from many of our memories the massacre of 20,000 Zimbabweans in the 1980s.

That erasure opens one door and one door only – another strongman leader will do the same.

To paraphrase the philosopher George Santayana, those who have erased our memory of our terrible past are condemned to repeat it.