Robert Mugabe does sometimes put on a well-placed display of irony and showmanship whose implications reverberate in distant places.
There was the time, some years ago, when gay rights activist Peter Tatchell tried to stage a citizen’s arrest on him in London, on the grounds that Mugabe’s regime persecuted gays in Zimbabwe. Of course Tatchell didn’t get very far in this attempt, because neither the American nor the British governments had the guts to try to extradite the wily old fox of the chimurenga and bring him to justice. (Gays aren’t high priority when it comes to justice, anyway.)
But it did give Mugabe ammunition for a diatribe against the West and all its corrupt, racist values. Whenever British Prime Minister Tony Blair tried to step into the fray about his land-grab policies, Mugabe sneered disdainfully about “Blair and his gay gangsters” and their hypocrisy over the just issue of the black peasants of Zimbabwe, who were landless because an earlier generation of gay gangsters, led by the decidedly gay Cecil Rhodes, had dispossessed them.
Touché.
He is now enjoying the slow unfolding of his latest coup de théâtre.
When 70 mercenaries landed at Harare airport, intending to have a smooth ride in their arms buying spree before flying on to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea, Uncle Bob’s men were waiting for them. They were taken off the plane, stripped, manacled, beaten up, and later paraded for all the world to see — a motley crew, mostly shame-faced black men, and a score or so of even more shame-faced white men who undoubtedly made up the tatty officer class of this little band of dogs of war.
Uncle Bob’s master stroke, once again, was to strip the white mercenaries of their arrogance and herd them like cattle from their jail cells, mixed in without distinction among their black co-dogs, and dressed, to their obvious embarrassment, in the ill-fitting, ugly khaki shirt and shorts that have been imposed across Africa as the black man’s badge of servitude. Suddenly they all looked like houseboys.
It’s Uncle Bob’s theatre of the absurd all over again. And the world’s reaction was exactly as the great impresario had intended it to be — outrage from the deluxe seats, cheers from the peanut gallery.
Played out at a time when the world was pretending to be shocked at the naked brutality of the American military at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad (“a handful of rogue operatives” said the Pentagon — yeah, right) there was an outcry at the thought that the same might be happening to the hapless mercenaries in Harare, and their colleagues who had preceded them and were unlucky enough to get caught in Malabo itself. (Very few people are known to have come out of an Equatorial Guinea jail in one piece — even petty thieves.)
More hypocrisy. Even if Teodoro Obiang Nguema, life president and murderous dictator of that country, is something of a bad egg (just like Saddam Hussein), it hardly follows that the mercenaries, and whatever shady power or consortium of powers was backing them, are a bunch of cherubs. Their collective backgrounds as apartheid-era special forces operatives and Angolan mercenaries allied to the likes of Jonas Savimbi and Holden Roberto scarcely speaks in their favour as angels of mercy bearing the fruits of freedom to one of the continent’s most oppressed countries (just like the Americans and the British in Iraq).
These are men who, less than 20 years ago, would have gladly seen Mugabe and Nelson Mandela and their ilk rot in jail for the rest of their lives. Mugabe’s point, nicely understated, is that the boot is now on the other foot. And the soldiers of fortune and their supporters are squealing “foul”!
And then there are the spouses, weeping for their loved ones back home. Here we had extraordinary scenes on television news of Afrikaner tannies who not long ago would not have drunk out of the same cup as a black person leading a march on the Union Buildings in Pretoria that could rival the great Women’s March of 1956. And like the women of the Congress Alliance way back then, this sad little crowd of black and white women were carrying a petition in their hands — although not hardly as impressive as the piles of signatures the Congress women delivered on that previous occasion.
Strange sight indeed. The black wives, who, like their husbands on the doomed expedition to Equatorial Guinea, vastly outnumbered their white counterparts, sang and danced in traditional revolutionary fashion as they approached the seat of government. The white wives tried to keep up.
Then the leading tannie read out the petition (although, with half the government off in Zurich to lobby for the 2010 World Cup, there didn’t seem to be anybody in the Union Buildings to listen).
“We want to see our husbands,” she read, unable to control the tears. “We fear for their lives. We want them to be returned to South Africa so that they can receive a fair trial.”
Yes, we live in interesting times indeed. The chances of apartheid’s former foot soldiers being sent back from the scene of the crime to be tried under the Constitution they would have died rather than see come into existence are about as slim as those of Mugabe being extradited to Britain to face charges of violating the rights of homosexuals in Zimbabwe.
Of course, most of the time everyone wishes Mugabe would just disappear into a hole in the ground. But now and then his flourishes of sardonic repartee with an outraged world can be somewhat entertaining.