The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
My heart agonisingly aches in sullenness for Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s demise. While weeping can only endure for a while, Cde Mugabe’s passing on offers a solid premise to recollect and curate the mortality of his exploits to Zimbabwe and Africa’s continued decolonisation.
History would be inadequate if it does not account for his prime role in the architecture of the realignment of property rights. In so doing, he lived up to the creed of the full realisation of Africa’s political and economic freedom. He lived to satisfy the core and enduring values of anti-colonial resistances shared by the people of colour from Cape to Cairo.
While it was inevitable that one day he would join his fellow pan-Africanist contemporaries, his death presents us with a fatal repository loss.
He leaves a legacy of controversy within the echelons of the international system — having been a crude internationalist with thin decorum to be accorded honour by global hegemonic elements. He is loved and hated for his hard piercing castigation of the unrestricted supremacy of the Western world.
To Afro-conscious minds Mugabe is a protagonist in as much as he is a villain to pro-imperial thinkers. Robert Mugabe — not the person, but the idea (Mugabeism) now is a perennial emblem of “third-world” redemptive self-consciousness. In his lifetime, VaMugabe benchmarked an unimpeded affirmative proclamation of 21st century world-systems re-ordering.
He championed a firm stand against the one-sided power dimension of Anglo-American arrogated supremacy over Africa. To this end, his legacy echoes an unequivocal disfavour to a third-ness couched on positioning the imperial and neo-imperial as the first-world. It is against this background that his statesmanship ranks high above the polarised and distorted constructs of his legacy’s domestication in the Zimbabwean political discourse.
While the temptation to concentrate on his international political figurehead is hard to resist, it would remiss to alienate the merits of his contribution to the birth of Zimbabwe since 1980.
An institution of liberation memory
In Mugabe, Africa has lost a perspectival mirror of a deep-rooted pan-Africanist spirit which plagued slavery and colonialism to its knees.
Beyond rhetoric, the former President, is an effigy of punished conscience of liberation. Many would want to remember him for what they hated about him, but through him a binding anti-imperial political soul was acquired.
Today we are a free people who have defined our place in time and in space in locating the dignity we had long lost to racism, colonialism and apartheid.
His Third-Chimurenga philosophy remains an affixing lever to our optimistic confrontation with the future as a liberated nation. In his place of rest, Mugabe leaves behind grand imperial anecdotes aimed at criminalising his legacy, but beyond these fruitless efforts to buy hate for him from his people, he is cherished for being a resolute freedom fighter.
The clear record of his leadership antagonistically deconstructs imperial propaganda disparaging his father-figure status to the memory of our struggle against colonialism.
A pan-African internationalist
His axiomatic teacher status sufficiently merited the reconstruction of our density of being as Africans and how we identify with one another.
His drive towards a seemingly radical racial consciousness, offered a pragmatic revisitation to the formative bearings of our solidarity against our erstwhile colonisers. His critical engagement with the peripheral dislodgement of Africans as a sub-human class in the world substantiates the perpetuity of the derogatory subjugation of our people which we must continue fighting against in our lifetime.
Our generation cannot afford to ignore his enduring and relentless energy to de-centre the West from its superficial and self-arrogated omnipotence.
This explains his demand for the reforming of the United Nations Security Council.
Mugabe is a symbol of Africa’s conceited deconstruction of the binaries of power and capital emanating from colonial instruction and manufacture.
Due admiration goes to his unflinching revolutionary concreteness which involuntarily subdued Zimbabwe to share his personhood and legacy with the oppressed masses of the world. Just like Jamiaca’s Marcus Garvey, Guinea-Bissau’s Amilcar Cabral and Martinique’s Frantz Fanon, Mugabe is Zimbabwe’s anti-imperial stalwart whose record in history will be that of defiantly fighting the apexes of colonial and neo-colonial repression.
African nationalist reigns
The invention of Robert Mugabe’s “unpopularity” in Zimbabwe’s body-politick emanates from the land reform programme which was initiated in 1999. His sterling determination to dislodge post-liberation white monopoly was arrested through illegal sanctions.
By the very design of colonial convenience, the independence of 1980 was supposed to be merely political and not inclusively economical. Clearly, the lesson from this experience is that the settler minority and their mother-countries had unresolved vendettas with the nationalist movement.
Therefore, the redressing of the land question justified the attack on Zanu-PF and its then leader, Robert Mugabe. The structural adjustment crisis and the growing labour movement despondences of the 90s were a well-choreographed effort to construct the image of a failed state in a bid to mobilise support for regime-change. The short-lived flirting with the West only exposed the pitfalls on national consciousness.
Therefore, the fight for economic equality spearheaded by the Mugabe administration revitalised the ethos of African nationalism. In so doing, Zanu-PF reversed the idea of the West to dismantle the genealogy of the nationalist element.
The ambition of effecting liberal political framework aimed at consolidating imperial monopoly capital was subdued by Zanu-PF’s popularity under Mugabe. In response punitive attacks were deployed on the economy to render the Zanu-PF led Government too weak to justify its existence.
Mugabe was projected as a dictator in international media and pro-regime change Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) circles. Mugabe’s resistance to conform to demands to liberalise capital in favour of White interests became the starting point of his return to a new struggle to preserve the power of the nationalist movement in Zimbabwe.
In light of this due diligence in awakening a new nationalist consciousness through his economic empowerment, Mugabe will be remembered as a defender of the true aspirations of our independence.
End of an Era?
Having excelled in his career as both a pioneering leader of Zanu-PF and the Founding Father of the First Republic, Mugabe will be remembered for his staunch Machiavellian politics. In the face of anti-establishment missiles directed towards his rule, he managed to keep the power of Zanu-PF intact.
He was the charismatic face of Zanu-PF’s popularity.
He emerged a victor in his fight against Western sponsored political arsenal. In so doing he preserved the continuity of Zanu-PF and consolidated its stay in power. It took a well conceited internal effort to retire him from politics after close to two decades of the opposition’s failure to get him out of power.
The interval between his retirement in November, 2017 and his elevation to glory has been characterised by the contested appropriation of his legacy by opposition political actors. In the 2018 Harmonised Election, Nelson Chamisa’s MDC made various attempts to align its campaign to the political legitimacy of the late former President.
The Zimbabwean retrospective voter ignored Chamisa’s claim of proximity to the old man and voted Zanu-PF. This shows the extent to which Robert Mugabe’s legacy will not be divorced from Zanu-PF. He died Zanu-PF.
The internal contradiction which paved way for the late former President out of Zanu-PF represents the natural dialect order of politics. It was inevitable that he was going to leave office at some point.
Given the circumstance of his unplanned elevation to glory, Operation Restore Legacy becomes key as it offered Zanu-PF an opportunity to resolve the succession question. The idea of producing a new Presidential candidate for the 2018 election and Robert Mugabe’s passing on in 2019 represents the pragmatic measure which was critical to preserve Zanu-PF’s stay in power.
Therefore, Zanu-PF must bank on the legitimacy of its founding veteran nationalist to shape the trajectory of its stay in power. The wisdom of Robert Mugabe’s leadership must continue to be revisited in creating a long term implementation of the positive side of his vision for Zimbabwe.
The anti-sanctions proposition by Sadc affirms the extent to which Mugabe’s determined stand against forces of colonialism is gaining more ground in Africa.
Those inspired by his ideological inclination must ensure that his legacy is well honoured by working towards the unification of Africa and fighting the neo-colonial sponsored solicit for regime-change in Africa. Our top lessons from his towering legacy include the supremacy of self-determination in fighting our sub-humanisation set by Western powers in their zeal to keep Africa oppressed.
Mugabe also taught us perseverance to claim what is ours. He taught us to think freely and to apply our faculties towards the restoration of our race’s dignity. Mugabe taught us self-reliance. These and many more lessons acquired from his leadership must continue to inspire Zimbabwe and Africa’s continued fight against imperialism.
Long-live the People’s Leader and Defender of African Dignity.
Long-Live the Doyen of Pan-Africanism.
Pamberi neChimurenga
Pamberi neZimbabwe
Pamberi nekuzvitonga!
– Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent researcher and a literature aficionado interested in the architecture of governance in Africa and political theory.
