Brothers under the Skin: Travels in Tyranny
by Christopher Hope
(Macmillan)
I was recently with some friends in the bar of the Freedom Hotel in Mwanza, Tanzania. The news on television was that Robert Mugabe had been given a standing ovation by delegates at the Southern African Development Community conference in Dar es Salaam.
Over their bottles of Kilimanjaro beer, my friends made clear their admiration for the Zimbabwean president. To them, he was an African hero, a black man brave enough to stand up to a confederacy of arrogant muzungus backed by the United States and Britain.
Brothers under the Skin is supposed to be a journey through and a meditation on tyrannies around the world, including Mugabe’s. The underlying premise is that all dictatorships have similar traits. As Christopher Hope describes his many sojourns in Zimbabwe, he recounts his impressions of the Soviet Union, East Germany, the former Yugoslavia and Vietnam, stressing their similarity to Mugabe’s reign of terror. Sadly, what promises to be highly edifying and enlightening juxtaposition from an obviously knowledgeable and talented writer ends up as a mishmash, albeit one with some value. There is a thinner, more vigorous book trying to get out of this cobbled work, some of which has already appeared in magazines and newspapers in the West.
Many have wanted to know how Mugabe, the central subject of the book, went from being a hero of the liberation struggle in Southern Africa to yet another African dictator. In his efforts to explain Mugabe the dictator, Hope compares him with Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid. I was not convinced by the comparison. Mugabe has increasingly proved to be ruthless and thoroughly evil; yet there is so much sui generis about him.
Among the theories explaining Mugabe’s autocracy is that his late Ghanaian wife, Sally, a significant figure in her own right in liberation-movement circles, had served as a corrective to her husband’s authoritarian tendencies. After her death, Mugabe married Grace Marufu, many years his junior, and that, it is argued, is when the rot started.
Although Brothers under the Skin tries to pry into Mugabe’s background, stating that his father abandoned his mother when he was a child, and that he was then raised as a strict Catholic, it does not go much further.
In a particularly vivid episode, Hope meets an elderly Ian Smith, the Rhodesian leader. Smith, predictably, berates Mugabe and reminisces about the good old days when the country was under his rule. Hope dismisses Smith as mendacious and deluded. Smith’s fellow whites are shown to be myopic, bigoted, lazy and complacent.
While this might be the case, it is worth noting that ordinary Zimbabweans are not filled with as much venom against their white compatriots as are Mugabe and his cohorts. Also, many of these whites are being received with open arms by neighbouring Zambia and Mozambique, which value their skills.
Mugabe has not always been bad, and his achievements, which Brothers under the Skin does not mention, were once significant. What is truly sad about Mugabe’s eventual misrule is not only the displacement of the white farmers but the massive migration of black professionals to South Africa, Britain and the United States.
Despite its jerkiness, Brothers under the Skin is worth reading. My friends at the Freedom Hotel will dismiss it as a tirade from another bitter white man. I wish they were more aware of recent African history. After all, there was once, across the lake by which we stood, another black hero — one who made white men carry him on a palanquin and threw out the Asians. His name was Idi Amin. — Â