The war hero cult played an important part in this discourse. Former guerrillas—and many less genuine freedom fighters but true ZANU “big men”—were granted the official status of national and provincial heroes, and burial ceremonies provided recurrent occasions to rehearse the ruling party’s contribution.7 However, through the years, the granting of this status—with the pension accruing to the family—was increasingly perceived as tainted by political favoritism. Known nationalist leaders outside the ruling party, such as the late Ndabaningi Sithole (the first ZANU president) and the late Enoch Dumbutshena—repeatedly labeled “traitors” by government propaganda—were denied a burial in the national Heroes’ Acre. On the contrary, Mugabe’s henchmen in the first decade of the twenty-first century (such as Border Gezi or Hitler Hunzvi), who had a limited or nonexistent liberation war record, were buried there, ostensibly rewarded for their contribution to the “Third Chimurenga” (the regime’s code name for violent farm invasions and subsequent political repression since 2000).
Beyond reward and retribution, this policy betrays a self-serving appropriation and political manipulation of the country’s history. The nationalist posture remained to this date a powerful political resource for Mugabe and ZANU-PF, both locally and on the international scene, and the vindictive nationalist discourse on stolen land, fallen heroes, and the party’s outstanding contribution to “liberation” was recycled at every election after 1980. Not only was this militant discourse a means to mobilize supporters and silence critics but it provided a convenient excuse to sideline embarrassing issues such as poverty alleviation and bad governance. To a large extent, the political developments unraveling since February 2000 constitute the culmination of this exhausted strategy.
Admittedly there were good enough reasons in the early 1980s for most observers to disregard ZANU-PF’s autocratic tendencies. The regime boasted some early successes in the economic and social realm: growth in education and health services, and an initial increase of workers’ wages—a gain already offset by inflation as early as 1983.8 However, these policies were obviously not financially sustainable without a constant inflow of foreign aid, and the initial trend toward poverty alleviation and economic restructuring was reversed in the mid-1980s. While the Western and African Left hailed the so-called Zimbabwean “revolution” in the 1980s and passionately debated its socialist identity and level of achievements, it paid little attention to the true nature of the regime: the retrogressive and authoritarian nature of the one-party state project and the selfish accumulation drive hidden behind the state’s control of the economy.9 The Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of the early years served handily to deceive the radical intellectuals, and many rallied behind ZANU-PF in want of better options.
However, rhetoric aside, the government’s economic policy did not depart significantly from the interventionist policies of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) period.10 Mugabe and many of his associates saw Marxist-Leninist discourse as an idiom of power: they used it initially as a weapon in the guerrilla movement’s “struggle within the struggle,” and they retained it as a useful political tool when in control of the state. Therefore, Mugabe probably did not believe more in socialism than in democracy or human rights—or black empowerment for that matter.11 These discourses had essentially a legitimization purpose.
Mugabe’s agenda of monopolizing power and controlling resources was partly derailed by adverse circumstances, internal squabbles, and more decisively by the resilience of the people in keeping some democratic spaces open: at the university, in the media, in the trade union movement, in the judiciary, and by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which formed a frontal challenge to ZANU-PF rule. The deep nature of Mugabe’s regime pointed at the surface at least a decade earlier when the police violently quelled students and workers’ protests.12 The extensive use of repressive legal instruments originally created by the white settler state, such as the Law and Order Maintenance Act and the state of emergency, revealed the remarkable continuity in the security sector from the Rhodesian Front (RF) to ZANU-PF. Nevertheless, it took another ten years for most observers to understand the authoritarian nature of Mugabe’s regime and its contempt for the rule of law. The one-party state mentality prevailed in daily politics and ZANU-PF showed no hesitation to use violence against its opponents when it felt threatened. The relative pluralism of the press in the 1990s—after an era of tight government control in the 1980s—and the seemingly independent and effective court system gave civil society at large, and political activists more specifically, a false sense of strength and security until mid-2000. Almost all opponents and media—reading from columns in the local press between 1994 and late 1999—underestimated Mugabe’s recklessness and cynicism. According to the dominant view, in the mid-1990s—at least in domestic media and the diplomatic milieu—democratization was under way, and a “younger,” “technocratic,” “reformist” ZANU was willing to promote this agenda when conditions became more conducive—meaning when Mugabe retired. This was more wishful thinking than insightful vision, as later years demonstrated. With the food riots, the mass strikes, and the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 1998 was certainly a turning point. However, for most observers only the violence associated with the farm invasions and the 2000 parliamentary elections was a true eye-opener. Many former ZANU-PF sympathizers then began to criticize Mugabe openly and asked the obvious question: What went wrong?
For analysts on the radical left, Mugabe had sold his soul to international capital when the government adopted the Economic Structural Adjustment Program (ESAP) in the early 1990s;13 thus, the land reform was only a political gimmick to divert the workers’ attention from the main struggle.14 For some others, the nationalist project was derailed by Mugabe’s transformation into a mad autocrat.15 Further research will perhaps support the view that a selfish ruling class hijacked the nationalist project. Brian Raftopoulos, a veteran social scientist and a committed civil society activist, produced some promising material toward this end.16 However, most of the literature published on the Zimbabwean crisis to date—with a strong contingent of books authored by foreign journalists formerly posted in Harare17—consists in chronological accounts of the major developments since February 2000. In these works there is little in-depth analysis offered of the processes leading to the current disaster. The reckless survival politics that plunged the country into ruin and desperation cannot be comprehended without a better understanding of Mugabe’s political trajectory and that of his party since independence. Instead of betraying their original project—purportedly the liberation of the country and empowerment of the masses, as is often alleged, the ruling party’s leaders remained faithful to their true albeit hidden ambition.
Their behavior since 2000 sheds a crude light on the nature of their domination, which is in essence autocratic and neopatrimonial. Derived from Max Weber’s typology of the forms of political domination, the concept of neopatrimonialism describes political systems with a certain degree of institutional development, yet with personalized power relations and a trend toward systematic private appropriation of public money by the rulers.18 Corruption, contempt for the rule of law, and abuse of state power are syndromes of neopatrimonial rule. Among African states, Zimbabwe was in 1980 one of the least patrimonialized—thanks to the relative sophistication of the Rhodesian state—but it changed radically through twenty-five years of ZANU-PF rule. An entire elite connected to ZANU-PF benefited from Mugabe’s tenure in power and accumulated personal wealth at the expense of the nation and its economy, and still today a subtle blend of intimidation and patronage ensures its loyalty. However, the ruling party has long ceased to function as a collective decision-making body, if it ever did, and Mugabe’s ultimate authority cannot be challenged with impunity—a complex situation best captured by the notion of personal rule.19
Zimbabwe’s top leader’s career therefore deserves close attention, starting with his rise to political prominence in the guerrilla war and culminating