Mugabe’s descent into tyranny – What went wrong?

Written by Trevor Grundy

Wednesday, 25 November 2009 16:48

From Liberator to Dictator – An insider’s account of Robert Mugabe’s descent to tyranny By Michael Auret (Foreword by Trevor Ncube)
David Phillip, an imprint of New Africa Books, 279 pp
R134 in South Africa, £10 in UK, E12 in EU
(Pictured: President Robert Mugabe with Archbishop Patrick Chakaipa (1932-2003). He officiated at the despot's second marriage to Grace Marufu and vetoed publication of a report detailing massacres against innocent civilians in the Zimbabwean Midlands and Matabeleland between 1983-1987 (Picture credit: Trevor Grundy)
In 1980, Julius Nyerere said that Mugabe had inherited the Jewel of Africa. Powdered glass is all that remains.
To try and find answers to questions about what went wrong, many of us turned the pages of hefty tomes penned by journalists with African experience - Richard Dowden’s Africa – Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, Martin Meredith’s The State of Africa, Guy Arnold’s Africa – A Modern History. We have also sobbed along with Peter Godwin (Mukiwa and When the Crocodile Eats the Sun), Andrew Meldrum (Where there is Hope) and Alexandra Fuller (Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight) as well as David Blair’s Degrees in Violence, Stephen Chan’s Robert Mugabe and the inimitable Judith Todd and her best work to date, Through the Darkness.

Sadly, almost all of them are way beyond the financial reach of young Africans who most need to know the ins and outs, the u-turns in the story about what the Zimbabwean writer Lawrence Vambe called an ill-fated people.

So, welcome to a new, modest, book by an author who succeeds better than any of the above in conveying what it meant to be in thrall to Robert Mugabe while, at the same time, serving the temporal and spiritual needs of the Roman Catholic Church after 1980.

The author has an advantage over most other writers about Robert Mugabe and his age because he was there when a car called ‘Zimbabwe’ was designed, placed on the drawing board, test driven and finally crashed , hurling four to five million people out into places like Botswana, Britain and South Africa.

This is an important work, written with a pen dipped into the lifeblood of a committed Christian whose career in Africa spanned the hey-day of white rule in the 1950s to the collapse of the Mugabe experiment in nepotism, corruption and violence that will extend into the second decade of the 21st century.

The son of white settlers, Auret served 10 years in the Federal Army and 12 years faming before Robert Mugabe became Prime Minister of Zimbabwe in 1980.

Like another great white Rhodesian- born writer and political activist, Hardwicke Holderness, (Lost Chance in Africa) he was no slouch when it came to physical courage.

Deported under the rule of Ian Smith, Auret returned home and took up the job of Chairman of the Justice and Peace Commission - one of the finest and best respected wings of the Roman Catholic Church in Africa. In that role he came face to face with the unwelcome truth of what was happening in Mugabe’s rarely criticized (by the Western media) Zimbabwe.

At Independence, Auret and almost everyone else who was there at the time was overwhelmed by Mugabe’s speech of ‘reconciliation’ which was aimed at the hearts rather than the minds of men and women who had been traumatized by seven years of war (1972-1979)and life after 30,000 African deaths.

“If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and an ally with the same national interest, loyalty, rights and duties as myself,” he said.

The world swooned.

Auret charts well the sad decline from early days of Mugabe’s undoubted achievement in the fields of health and education in the early 1980s to the creation of his rule of tyranny, fear and barbaric cruelty in the 1990s and throughout this sad, departing decade.

He met Mugabe several times. He makes no attempt to hide how he was captivated by the man’s high intelligence and apparent sincerity.

When he discovered what happened in Matabeleland and the Midlands between 1983-1987 - the slaughter of over 20,000 men women and children accused of being “ dissidents” in order to wipe out Mugabe’s main rival Joshua Nkomo and his supporters - Auret was shattered.

But like so many of us, he went on believing that if only Mugabe knew what was going on …

Fortunately, Auret’s publishers in South Africa have not made the silly claim that here is the alpha to omega story of what went wrong and why.

It’s not that but it most definitely is an important contribution to our understanding of events between 1980 and 2000, an essential piece in a yet to be completed jig-saw puzzle that will one day reveal the face of one of the most extraordinary men in modern African history. And there’s no American style happy ending, no pot of gold at the end of an African rainbow.

Mike Auret warns us that even when Mugabe fades, or is blown away, we have his followers to contend with. He writes with chilling truth that “there is little moral conscience among them and perhaps they have another chapter to write before they succumb to the pressure of their neighbours and the world.” - Reviewed by Trevor Grundy

mugabe_cover_book

Cover of the Book ( Trevor Grundy)

Author Mike Auret with HH Pope John Paul 11 in March 1979. In the centre is Bishop Tobias Chiginya of Gweru who visited the Vatican with Auret on the eve of Zimbabwe's Independence.

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