3. Severe Conflicts: Frustration-Deprivation
5.2. Managing the Nationalist Discourse: From Revolt to Rule
5.2.3. The Multiplicity of Independence Narratives
After independence in April of 1980, the democratic momentum of that
transitional moment released a plethora of narratives that ZANU could not contain. First, there was an exuberant international narrative of ‘African black liberation from white minority rule’ heralded by the most unlikely bedfellows - both the communist and democratic global communities (albeit for different ideological reasons). So enamoured was the world by the newly independent status of Zimbabwe that it was unable to accept any evidence of trouble within the country’s borders.
“Sadly also there was a lot of deliberate silence or looking the other way by the West because the West was virtually desperate that Zimbabwe should be a
462 Interview: TR1, Oxford, UK – 21/10/08 – (White British professor, researcher and widely published author who is a leading authority on the history of Zimbabwe).
168 success story. And they were really hopeful that Robert Mugabe was, you know, a W.O.G…a Western oriented gentleman.”463
“But the Britain Zimbabwean Society was caught in the same dilemma as the other groups like the Catholic International Relations were caught in. We existed to say, ‘Hooray, here’s a brand new Zimbabwe’. You didn’t want to have to say,
‘Oh my God, it’s not.”464
Second, initially the ZANU-PF embraced a platform of reconciliation, offering a narrative of peace and seeming willingness to dialogue with the various external and internal antagonists involved in the independence struggle. In his inauguration address, Mugabe extended a hand of collaboration to his former ‘enemies’, calling the nation to adjust and:
“…relate to each other as brothers bound one to another by a bond of national comradeship…We are being born again not as individuals, but collectively as a people, nay, as a viable nation of Zimbabweans. If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and an ally with the same national
interest, loyalty, rights and duties as myself. If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds me to you and you to me.”465
Enraptured by the euphoria of the inauguration, the masses who gathered at Rufaro Stadium in Harare on the 17th of April 1980 most likely only heard what sounded like benevolent overtures from their new Prime Minister. However, with the hindsight of the Matabeleland massacres, it would seem that this pontificating about reconciliation was a form of political-correctness; a disguised nationalist discourse demanding conformity and driven by the dynamics of ‘ethnocentrism, group-think and rank disequilibrium’466.
Third, above and beyond the international and national rhetoric, a myriad of provincial and local alternative social formations (political, church and civil society) emerged after the all-inclusive elections and rapidly filled the available democratic space with their particular narrative interests. “The government that came to power in
Zimbabwe at independence in 1980 inherited a state apparatus that was relatively
463 Interview: JM1, Johannesburg, South Africa - 26/02/08 – (Shona Professor of Political Science in Zimbabwe).
464 Interview: TR1, Oxford, UK – 21/10/08 – (White British professor, researcher and widely published author who is a leading authority on the history of Zimbabwe).
465 Motjuwadi, S. 1980. “Uhuru as Mugabe takes Power”, in Couzens, T. (ed.) Zimbabwe: The Search for Common Ground Since 1890 – From the pages of DRUM magazine, Harare: NatPrint: 309.
466 Mandel, R. 1979. Perception, Decision-making and Conflict. Washington DC: University Press of America, Inc., 15-48.
169 developed in African terms and, in turn, confronted an array of coherent interest groups capable of putting the country’s new leaders under varying kinds of conflicting
pressures.”467 Whether in the realms of media, health, or victims of demobilisation violence, finding one’s democratic voice seemed to be the order of the day:
“The Bulawayo Chronicle wasn’t responsible to any political party. It had not yet been taken over by the State; it felt free to interview who and whoever you like. So it was still a real newspaper. It still had journalism anyway. And reading the Chronicle in 1980-1981, you had interviews of the ZIPRA women who were brought back into the assembly point, you had reports of the dissidents in Manicaland and remarkable broad coverage.”468
“My research was in the east, in Makoni and as I told you before, there were rumours of events in Matabeleland about prior Entumbane [demobilisation camp]
insurgents and dislodged Manica people were going back home, fleeing Bulawayo because they had been made victims of these stories. They had been made victims of the Ndebele. They’d been asked to say this word which you have all the clicks possible and if you were Shangaan you can’t possibly say…So in Manicaland, in Makoni, you have the extraordinary situation where old ladies who’d never been in Matabeleland, who’d never seen an Ndebele, calling for vengeance on them and so on.”469
“And you had this dramatic record of the meeting in Kupane [in 1983] where Mugabe has come to have reports on development. And all the people there are bringing up…’seventy schools were built’. This is right in the middle of the Gukurahundi and nobody says anything at all about the security situation until the German doctor…at St Luke’s Hospital, she was there. And they ask her whether she has anything to say about the medical situation. And she says ‘my hospital is full of terribly wounded and dying people who have been beaten up by the Fifth Gang’. They’re absolutely shocked because she is saying this to Mugabe.”470
In the above recollections, it appears evident that early on in Zimbabwe’s independence, a wave of transitional freedom swept across the nation and its citizens. The protagonists of democracy felt empowered to pursue a course of uncensored speech and freedom of association, ideals that most black Zimbabweans felt they deserved and had fought hard for. For the ZANU-PF, the cacophony of this democratic palaver of contrasting ideas and
467 Gerhert, G. 1991. Book review of Herbst, J. 1990. State Politics in Zimbabwe. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press. Retrieved from the web 09/04/09. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/47127/gail-m- gerhert/state-politics-in-zimbabwe.
468 Interview: TR1, Oxford, UK – 21/10/08 – (White British professor, researcher and widely published author who is a leading authority on the history of Zimbabwe).
469 Ibid.
470 Ibid.
170 colliding values seemed to threaten their newly acquired power and represented more ambiguity than they were willing to absorb. “The play of conflicting interests in a framework of shared purposes is the drama of a free society. It is a robust exercise and a noisy one, not for the fainthearted or the tidy-minded.”471
Amidst this democratic disorder, ZANU-PF needed an ordering or controlling script. The disgruntled, fledgling groups of ex-ZIPRA and other third force ‘dissidents’472 in the regions of Matabeleland and Midlands represented a counter-narrative which provided just the sustaining plot ZANU-PF needed to re-write its own nationalist meta- drama from. ZANU-PF as a political organization, riding on its Liberation credentials and its sweeping Election victory in April 1980, took the risk of singularly attempting to define and dictate the nationalist agenda which resulted in a crisis of grave proportions.