One of the upshots of the Zimbabwe crisis is the number of books deciphering it. Writers go there, spend a few months and decide, after seeing so much crazy stuff going on, that they can write a book.
The results, mostly, have been at best half-ignorant books telling us what we already know and, at worst, downright inaccurate fantasies that feed into racist stereotypes, playing into the hands of the nationalists running the show.
The same cannot be said about Judith Garfield Todd’s Through the Darkness (Zebra), a welcome and authoritative account of post- independence Zimbabwe.
For one thing its authority comes from the manifold letters, journals and documents at her disposal. For another, it comes from the fact that the writer knew personally many of the key nationalists, right from PresiÂdent Robert Mugabe down to the disabled war veteran.
Zimbabwe Project, a welfare organisation she headed for many years, helped many of the war-wounded veterans.
The book starts with the detention of her father, former reformist prime minister Garfield Todd, under the notorious Law and Order Maintenance Act reincarnated by Mugabe as the Public Order and Security Act. She was detained for five weeks and was forced into exile while her father remained under house arrest until 1976.
Todd records the pointers to the present crisis, beginning with the flight into exile of nationalist Joshua Nkomo, former leader of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu), and the arbitrary arrest and detention of opponents. Todd wryly notes that “it was just like the old times under Ian Smith’s Rhodesia Front, except now the abusers of power were black …”.
The notes and journals used in writing the book provide so much detail, albeit personal, that they give the work an air, at times foggy, of heavy authenticity. The highlight, for me, was the recording of the death of unheralded guerrilla hero Lt-General Lookout Masuku.
Masuku was head of the Zimbabwe People’s Republic Army, Zapu’s military wing. Todd’s might be the first comprehensive account of the death of the commander who was arrested on treason, acquitted by the courts but detained until a few weeks before his death; he was one of the first victims of Aids in Zimbabwe. It is a moving chapter recording Masuku’s inexorable journey towards his end, written in painstaking detail, shorn of embellishment and portraying excruciating agony.
Todd gives us an insight into the beginnings of the land crisis: how ministers and other influential ZanuPF people allocated themselves pieces of land, equipment and livestock meant for ordinary folk. Likewise she also uses the example of Zimpapers, publishers of government newspapers, on whose board she sat and from where she was later ejected. She writes about the systematic looting there, symptomatic of what was going on at other parastatals.
Todd’s account of the work she did for war veterans, for detained Zapu “dissidents”, for victims of Gukurahandi (see box above) and generally for freedom before and after 1980 would be enough to secure her a place at the national shrine, the Heroes Acre. But, alas, that’s a privilege for citizens, which she is not. Current Minister of Home Affairs Kembo Mohadi, a former Zapu MP whose freedom Todd fought for when Mugabe hounded him back in the 1980s, stripped her of citizenship.
Todd’s book includes insights, astute analyses and prophetic comments made in 1980 by people who knew Mugabe, such as Aaron Mutiti, who warned people to be alert. “What Mugabe himself has done to his fellow Zimbabweans in exile during the past three years deprives his hollow assurances of any crediÂbility. Unless the people of this country are vigilant, they are in for a rude shock. Family life, religious life and economic life as we know it will progressively disappear if Mugabe gets to power. We must not close our eyes to this threat. He rates his communist ideology higher than the people.”
This weighty read, with its sometimes dense cast, is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Zimbabwe. It brings fresh commentary on how the country’s nationalist leadership brought the proud stone walls of Zimbabwe into a veritable ruin, all the while its blood-stained flag held aloft.
When the war won
The report on the Gukurahundi massacres in Zimbabwe, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: A Report into the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980 to 1988, was compiled by the Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice and the Legal Resources Foundation. It was first published in 1997 and is available now in South Africa.
Gukurahundi was a civil war in which Robert Mugabe’s government dispatched highly trained soldiers to suppress armed dissidents committed to destroying government property and other acts in rural Matabeleland. Up to 20Â 000 civilians were killed.
The book has an introduction by activist and writer Elinor Sisulu and a foreword by Archbishop of Bulawayo Pius Ncube.
“It is no coincidence that this [original] report is entitled Breaking the Silence. Indeed, one of its main intentions is to get national acknowledgement of a ‘chunk of Zimbabwean history which is largely unknown except to those who experienced it first hand’,” Sisulu writes.
Horrible things happened then in what Mugabe has described as a “moment of madness”. The report does not only recount gruesome incidents, which are plentiful and truly heart-stopping, but gives a background to the massacres, including a capsule history of the times.
The report manages to capture the madness and sheer cruelty that prevailed, as when it quotes Emerson Mnangagwa, then a security minister, parodying the scriptures: “Blessed are they who will follow the path of the government laws, for their days on Earth shall be increased. But woe unto those who will choose the path of collaboration with dissidents for we will certainly shorten their stay on Earth.”
Brutal beatings, torture and murders ensued for thousands upon thousands of villagers. The writers of the report state that they do not “seek to apportion blame” but merely “to break the silence surrounding this phase in the nation’s history”.
This is a timely publication as Zimbabweans try to exorcise the ghosts, both past and current, that stalk the land. — Percy Zvomuya