The making of Mugabe’s intolerance
How an autocratic strain of pan-Africanism of the early 1960s shaped Robert Mugabe.
Robert Mugabe at the 12th AU Summit in Addis Ababa, 2009. Public domain image, credit Jesse B. Awalt (US Navy).
The recent spate of obituaries on the late Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe have wrestled with efforts to balance the apparent discrepancy between his contributions to the country’s liberation struggle versus his betrayal of human rights and justice while head of Zimbabwe for nearly four decades. However, a closer inspection of Mugabe’s early political record indicates that this chasm is not nearly so paradoxical as the surface view suggests. While revelries of Mugabe’s pan-Africanism, as embodied in a tweet by Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa announcing his predecessor’s death, are largely responsible for the spate of interest in the 95-year-old’s passing, Mugabe’s commitment to the ideology was a double-edged sword.
Pan-Africanism helped ignite Zimbabwe’s independence struggle in the early 1960s, but it also injected a strain of intolerant authoritarianism into the liberation movement of which Mugabe played a leading role from mid-1960. A number of prominent scholars of pan-African governance such as Ali Mazrui, Thandika Mkandawire, and Claude Ake have pointed to the consolidation of authoritarian influences across Africa at this time as pan-African movements became governments and struggled to adjust to new realities.
Mugabe’s quest for unchallenged power as Zimbabwe’s leader following independence in 1980 was profoundly shaped by pan-Africanism’s abhorrence of division and disunity and the ideology’s emphasis on unquestioned unity as the basis of political power in early post-colonial Africa
In late May 1960, Mugabe returned home on leave from his teaching position in Ghana, then the mecca of pan-Africanism. Ghana was led by Kwame Nkrumah, an icon of post-colonial Africa, but a leader swiftly implementing autocratic governance at home. Abroad, Nkrumah believed that multiple anti-colonial liberation movements operating in one territory caused “despondency.” In early July, the world’s attention turned towards one of the most fraught cases of decolonization, in the former Belgian Congo. In the same month, Mugabe formally joined the nationalist struggle, joining the National Democratic Party (NDP) to oppose white settler rule in the then Southern Rhodesia.
By early 1961, the Congo’s Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was dead due to the intrigue of neocolonial forces and the country was temporarily partitioned. Divisions in Africa escalated with the formation of the Casablanca and Monrovia Groups, which clashed over divergent visions of Africa’s development trajectory. A spirit of contentious pan-Africanism was the background to Mugabe’s formative political years. The lengthy guerrilla war that culminated in Zimbabwe’s negotiated independence only served to further bolster Mugabe’s claim of holding a “degree in violence.”
