Clinical Conflict II: Call It Ideology
What Was Promised, What Remains
You know how oppression affects people? You’re going to work every day. You’re making peanuts to survive, day in and day out. You have your children, they struggle with fees even though they’re smart and good at school: they want to prosper and go to university, but there’s discrimination all the way, there’s what they call a bottleneck. You produce en masse, but the masses you are producing are the people who then end up, even with education, working in factories and on farms. Of course, you’ve got a few who become agents for the colonial administration: the boys in the office. Those are the people who go through the bottleneck, and the whole idea is to suppress everyone below that.
Now, why am I saying this? It starts with revolting, not an armed struggle. This is why in South Africa, you saw movements led by unions: they were good at gathering people and marching on the streets. The idea of holding a gun is still remote for a lot of people. It only becomes a possibility as oppression intensifies: when the impact of that oppression is felt generation after generation. Obviously, eventually, there’s a generation that says, “Hey, our parents could take all this shit, but we can’t.” By then, we’ve come to a point where there tend to be physical confrontations.
In the midst of that generation are people who slipped through the bottleneck. They’re sufficiently educated, and some of them end up in universities outside the country where they learn about revolts in other nations: they learn there are the possibilities of actually confronting the enemy, and they altogether take a new look at their own situation. Most liberation struggles follow this path. Knowledge and association with other people from other similar situations embolden you. People say: “This is it. We failed the revolt, it didn’t work. We’re gonna try the gun.” But at that point, nobody really has an understanding of what that means except that you are going to die. Because getting a gun means you shoot, or you’ll be shot. That’s it. That’s how it all starts.
As time goes, mobilization grows. More and more people join, including more educated people, people who really understand and value systems. Every revolutionary army needs a structure, which in turn comes to be the structure of the struggle. By now, the mind is opening to a lot of things, including the question: what are we in these structures? Invariably, you start to define yourselves and what you stand for. That’s where you start to hear “we are Marxist-Leninists.” [Laughs.] “We are Maoists.” In reality, it’s only when you’ve succeeded in dethroning the oppressor that you discover that some of those ideas and ideologies are not sustainable because they are not organic.
I’ll tell you what happened to me. When I left Rhodesia, I was about 18. I became an activist by reading a magazine called Parade and I used to take cuttings of most of the politicians—Robert Mugabe, Herbert Chitepo, many others. It carried information and news that diverged from what you’d get in the Rhodesia Herald, which obviously articulated the colonialists’ agenda demonizing the terrorist. I was in my last year of school when the war started in the northeastern part of the country, crossing the border into Mozambique. Before the war started, there were older students who simply did not turn up at school: the rumor was that they’d gone to Mozambique to join the armed struggle. Most people had similar experiences because much of the recruitment was happening at schools, especially in the border area. You would see whole schools disappearing, including the teachers. Because of the access I had to the magazines, I was very clear-minded about my role in the sense that I wished to become part of the liberation struggle. I wouldn’t say I had a particular ideology because we were simply focused on removing the white man. But if we’d call that practical desire an ideology, it recruited many people.
In the same year, we had a strike at our school: a revolt. I was accused of having thrown a stone that hit the principal. And it’s also very true that I did throw the stone. [Laughs.] This was in the third term of my last year. I was one of the students who were dismissed but I was allowed to write for those exams from home. I passed with exceptional colors, but I couldn’t proceed: I had been blacklisted and couldn’t go to university.
I had no choice but to get out. My mother managed to secure some money for me and I left for Bulawayo to stay with an uncle. While I was there, I met a guy called Thomas Masekera[1] who was much older than me. He had been dismissed from university, and he was recruiting people to leave the country to join the struggle.
I started hanging out with this group of guys. They used to gather after work at the pub in Bulawayo: Number Five. There were these two guys in particular who shared a house and would invite me over to listen to music while they were away. They had heaps and heaps of music, they taught me how to cook, and we would always talk politics. Thomas continued recruiting young people, and at some stage, he disappeared. We all thought he had been arrested, but he had vanished to Botswana. As it turns out, he was a representative of ZANU when he was in Zimbabwe, but clandestinely. I actually stayed with him when I went to Botswana; he had a place in Francistown. It became quite clear who he was. My desire for politics really grew in leaps and bounds, and my whole life changed because I started to really understand what was happening. And it was here I also came face to face with actual terrorists, with what they called “terrorists”: the guerrillas. I was working with them! They wouldn’t have arms, but they would sneak into Zimbabwe.
Listen to this. There was a place where refugees from the African National Congress, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the South West Africa People’s Organization, and other Namibians were being housed—a big complex run by a Catholic church. I knew some of them. One day, it was raided. There’s a guy I remember called Mutimukuru, a ZIPRA[2] guy. They tied him to a police truck and paraded him around, dragging him across Francistown. His whole skin was on the rope. It changed me.
In no time, Thomas had also disappeared, he had gone to Czechoslovakia because his life was under threat. I also left Botswana. The United Nations had given us scholarships and I ended up at University of Zambia. You remember I mentioned the guys who had vanished from my school? One of them had become a member of Chief of Staff in ZANLA, and he replaced Thomas in Francistown. I moved in with him, and I had access to all the literature: I learned about so many things that were happening, like armories at the border and guns being transported through the night to and across the border. I never went, but he would disappear, this guy.
I ended up at the University of Zambia, where I met my wife. During my first and second years, I was doing law and I was a very strong activist. And you know what happened? At some point, the guy, he was called Tendai . . . I’ve forgotten his surname now, but I think about him all the time because you can’t imagine what I’m going to tell you. The Rhodesian Army put a bounty of $25,000 on him and another guy called David Gore. They went to the border, and they were sold out by somebody—I think I know the person. They were captured at the border, tied together, and blown up by TNT. Their heads were missing. The only thing that remained of them were pieces of flesh all over the place, in bushes and on the ground. I was in Lusaka at that time, and there was turmoil in the party—this is around the time that Herbert Chitepo, the leader of ZANU, was assassinated. The university was closed; most of the people who were activists were put in jail.
Because I was really active, I hid in Kafue with my wife. This is where I met the first vice president of Zimbabwe, Mr. Muzenda: he gave us money and put us on the plane to Tanzania. I had to go to fight, so we went to the training camp in Mgagao. I left my wife at the party office because there was no base for women. She joined the other women at the farm where they were producing food for the guerrillas, and I went straight to Mgagao. I was there for quite some time.
And you know Solomon Mujuru who became the general? His nom de guerre was Rex Nhongo? He came to Mgagao. Mujuru was very senior, and they were looking for people with a university background to start running the office. I hadn’t finished my course, but that’s how I ended up there. This is how I met Robert Mugabe. I was taken to the Kariakoo office, and I reunited with my wife. We ended up with our own little space; I tell you, it was terrible. We used to sleep in this little room on a single bed with stacks of grenades and bazookas. And it was so hot! We would pour buckets of water on the floor for us to be able to breathe, and when we woke up in the morning, there would not be a single drop of water.
“I wouldn’t say I had a particular ideology because we were simply focused on removing the white man. But if we’d call that practical desire an ideology, it recruited many people.”
But I enjoyed that experience. I felt so privileged to meet all the fighters and big guys in the party office. I was made responsible for the budgets that gave money to the camps. I met another guy called James Mbuva, and the two of us were involved in that office. The internal turmoil in the party continued, and by now there were some serious plans to remove Mugabe. My good senses said that this is a struggle that is going astray. James and I drafted a letter to the Ghanaian ambassador to give to Mugabe’s wife Sally because she was Ghanaian. She managed to get in touch with the president and advised him that there’s a crisis back home. The next thing that happened is that Mugabe sent ZANLA commander Josiah Tongogara to Tanzania. I remember he gave me a shirt and trousers and a pair of shoes. And they got a scholarship from the Commonwealth Secretariat for me, my wife, and my colleague in the office. This is how I was able to finish my degree.
I was waiting for my wife to graduate because she was doing biochemistry and she had a year to go. Eventually, there was a call that came from Mujuru to join the new government. This was in March, independence was in April. That’s the basis of it, the experiences that really shaped my thinking. You can see where this whole journey took me. Now I’m going back to your question.
This was a time of intense reading and understanding other revolutions. Che Guevara, the Soledad Brothers, the Panthers, Martin Luther King, Karl Marx, Mao Tsetung, anything that came our way. And it was the same with most other people involved in the struggle because we had to understand that it’s not about just fighting: we also have to represent an idea about the struggle. What is it that we stand for? To be honest, you would have thought there would be a philosophical explanation of what we were doing as a group, but fundamentally, we all understood these ideas: we understood who our oppressor was and who his allies were. We knew Ian Smith depended on the police, he depended on South Africa, and he depended on other nations who busted sanctions on his behalf—there was a clear formation we could identify. Then there was the other formation: this was us. We identified who our allies and friends were and what they stood for. From there, we started to understand the task ahead of us in philosophical terms: that we were confronting an enemy bolstered by certain political and economic beliefs and practices. Ian Smith, for example, believed that black people are not good enough to run a country because they are not educated. But these philosophical terms constructed a broader structural background beyond this racist language: black people are not educated because the white person makes sure that they are not educated.
You were asking about ideology. I think the first thing I mentioned is that there was an understanding of what had driven other revolutions and other struggles, and out of this came the knowledge of how different movements chose which organizations they wanted to associate with. We as ZANLA had already defined ourselves separately from ZIPRA because they were MarxistLeninists: they were supported by the Soviet Union and their outlook was founded on that. They believed workers had a responsibility to overthrow the exploitative capitalist system, and the workers must own the means of industrial production. You know the story. But that’s why they trained like a conventional army: they were preparing to take over the state when the workers spearheaded the overthrow of the oppressive machine. It’s much more traditional vanguardism than people like us who were ready for guerrilla warfare, a peasant army. We did not even have uniforms!
Mao Tse-tung was guiding us to say you must be part of the peasantry: you must be synonymous with the peasant, you live with the peasant. The peasant is the sea, and you are the fish. They held power we had to utilize to build our army. There’s that small autobiography by Tongogara where he describes how our deep integration with the people made us a unique military threat. He wrote: “Ian Smith complained to his Parliament that the security forces were fighting a new type of guerrilla who does not want to fight us but directs his energy at helping the peasants. He described what he called ‘the new guerilla’ as far more dangerous than the one who carries the rifle on his shoulder and shuns the peasant.” This is what drove us; this is why we became Maoists. [Laughs.]
It just so happens that, in Mgagao where I was trained, there were Red Army commissars who lived there. That was the first time I’d ever seen a Chinese person. They’d bring lots of literature to the training camp because they were preparing us to understand Maoism and apply it to Zimbabwe. I’ll summarize this: maybe except for South Africa, none of these ideologies survived post-independence. I don’t think either side, neither ZANU nor ZAPU, had sufficiently built a strong popular base of understanding of what they represented.
I used to contribute to a magazine that was written by ZANU-PF. In 1991, of course, I was asked to respond to the overthrow of Gorbachev. I explained what had happened: how detached the Communist Party had become and how much they had gained from the workers they represented, but that everything was not as it appeared: the Soviet Union was more of an expression of power than deeply believed and implemented ideology. They didn’t want to publish it, and I was told that I was being unfair because we were all looking toward the communist state, to the Soviet Union, as a model. But we were also watching it collapse! It almost cost me my job. I said, you have a short memory. When did you become a Marxist-Leninist? Are we not justified in welcoming the demise of Gorbachev given how he abandoned the communist project and the people? This formula doesn’t work for us in Zimbabwe. We are a peasant-driven party. There is no industry, there is no critical mass of workers in that country! I was never a contributor for that magazine after that.
These ideologies never stuck because I don’t think they were organic as much as we deeply believed in them and saw them as vehicles for our liberation. And on the continent, there were just a few leaders who tried. Thomas Sankara, of course, and Amílcar Cabral. Senghor from Senegal who created the concept of Négritude. He was a sellout, that one. [Laughs.] And then who else? Then there was Nyerere and what he called Ujamaa. He was influential in the development of our politics. When you look at Ujamaa, you can see elements of Maoism: he believed in the organization of poor people and building from the base up rather than starting with the workers going downward. And then, there’s Kenneth Kaunda’s humanism. Those were the attempts at creating sustainable ideology, and most other things had more to do with regurgitating already established positions of the left. But there was nothing new on the continent, and that tells you the weakness of the politic. Just look at what happened in Zimbabwe after the fall of the Soviet Union and after China, in many ways, moved away from condemning capitalism and started to invite American capital. I remember very well: Zimbabwe felt lost. It was embarrassing to even suggest one was a Maoist. [Laughs.]
Mugabe was not even a Marxist. I remember very well that, when given a platform, Mugabe performed as a rabid Marxist. He understood very well why it was important to identify that way, because, from a political position, it was strategic to be the antithesis of the environment you are rebelling against. He could shout at the British and shame them for being colonialists: he was a very talented man who, in many ways, understood how the world is run. It was important for him to pose a contradiction, and it allowed him to get away with a lot of things. When he took over the land, it was justified because it was framed as a continuation of the revolution. He was a very clever man, but that doesn’t mean that he really believed it. He just understood how he could use it. This is typical of the leadership in most of Africa. Although it always looked quite clearly that the masses played a major role in these independence struggles, the mission of that generation was quite clear: to remove the instrument of oppression, the white regimes. But I don’t think they understood it fully in its international form: the connection between our oppressors and the rest of the capitalist world, the economic frame of capital’s operation.
There’s so much untruth in the things we hear from politicians. You get disappointed when you, for example, believe these Democrats in America are supposed to be the opposition only to find, my goodness, the things they are up to really doesn’t make them good opposition of any kind. It’s the nature of politicians, isn’t it? And this is why people are detaching themselves from politics. I see it a lot here; people just getting on with their lives.
I also got hold of a podcast about the Labour Party in England. Am I surprised that this disaffection can happen to the continent if it can happen to the continent of Karl Marx and political theory? Do I believe that Mandela represented any ideology? Can anyone tell me what it was? Because who didn’t go to prison in Africa if you were to become president? That doesn’t necessarily mean you represented anything. Put it this way: we sometimes make a mistake thinking that nationalism on its own represents a revolutionary ideology as such. You could call it an ideology because you are nationally representing the feeling of the majority toward an intruder, and you form yourself into a single collective of people. But when you talk about ideology beyond that, beyond the fight with your white oppressor, is there something of substance that represents any continuity of what you originally represented as a nationalist and the state you have created?
Those who went to war ask a question: is this what we fought for? Those who didn’t go to war, but were still involved in the war brought by the revolutionary formations, will say: is that what you promised us when you were fighting?
South Africa, for example, promised the Freedom Charter: land, equitable distribution, a standard of living. But out of all the promises, the only ones who really are enjoying and living up to the promise are those who made the promises. [Laughs.] This is the question that led to the land reform in Zimbabwe. People drive around the country and see the prosperity of white people; people go to their rural homes and are confronted by the same old poverty that sent them to war. That’s why these questions arise.
There was no clearly crafted politic because if there were, it would live on in seriousness, and it would live on beyond the state. It should live on. This is the dilemma the continent feels. And this is why, when you look at what’s happening, say, in Burkina Faso, it’s those people trying to relive the promises made by the initial nationalists: by Sankara and the people who took on and removed the French, who pushed for self-sufficiency. In the end, the same people—their voice, their power, their thinking—can be remembered by this new generation. They see the possibility in more or less the same context because not much has changed: they say, the French still exploit us because the generation before us sold us out, they could not sustain their promise. This new generation fighting and taking power: they use the same terms except this time they have a greater understanding of international capital. They need to possess it because it’s what makes the difference. You can see gold bars being shipped out of your country, but you have no single road going to that mine. What do you do? Enough is enough!
I always give South Africa as an example. What do you do when your ideology is neoliberal capitalism? There’s nothing you can do, no real change you can make if people are differentiated according to their class and still by their race. How do you change that pattern? I don’t know anymore.
[1] All names, save for major historical figures, are pseudonyms.
[2] ZIPRA, the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, is the paramilitary analogue of the Zimbabwean African People’s Union, ZAPU. ZANLA, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, is the paramilitary force of ZANU, the Zimbabwe African National Union, presently the ruling party. Although the groups were in ideological opposition, they operated together as the Patriotic Front. ZAPU was dissolved in 1987 after signing the Unity Accords, which ended the ZANU-led Gukurahundi massacres. ZANU, thus, became ZANU-PF, a euphemistic reconstitution of the wartime Patriotic Front as part of the ruling party’s mythology of the state.