Breakfast with Mugabe
By Fraser Grace, Directed by Anthony Sher for The Royal Shakespeare Company, London (May 2006). Reviewed by Victoria Brittain
In Africa, as in Europe, Presidents, Prime Ministers, almost universally hate to step down from power. Long after most of their people, and their own colleagues, wish they would go, they hang on, convinced the country still needs them. Fraser Grace's play about Zimbabwe in 2001 has a neat echo of Britain 2006. But whereas people are merely impatient with Blair, in the case of Mugabe the old African stereotypes come up and we say, he's mad. The Western press, with its hysterical coverage of the land question in Zimbabwe, and its demonising of Mugabe, over many years, has prepared popular British culture for a play like this.
Fraser Grace, a young writer from Derby who has written several successful plays, took a bold leap based on a newspaper article by a journalist with a history of unfriendliness to southern African liberation movements. It is astonishing that the Royal Shakespeare Company did not have any adviser brought in who would have raised a warning about the political minefield they were stumbling into.
‘Paranoid Mugabe dines with a ghost.’ Mugabe was depressed, and was being treated by a white psychiatrist, a Serb, is the Sunday Times story which became the play, Breakfast With Mugabe. Tempting but perilous territory for an imaginative writer, and probably only one who had never been to Zimbabwe would have been so daring. (In the programme Grace warmly thanks the journalist R. W. Johnson for his ‘half-page report, Ihave it here, in front of me.’)
I had breakfast with President Robert Mugabe myself once, some fifteen or twenty years ago, in an expensive London hotel where we ate in a small room, with the ministers and the bodyguards left outside. That Robert Mugabe was, with Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, one of Africa's leading intellectuals in power in the post-colonial period. He was cultivated, courteous, and as clever as his academic record of degrees gained in prison suggested. His conversation was about world economic trends, new books, though, inevitably, mostly about the grinding hidden war apartheid South Africa was waging against Angola, Mozambique, and the other Frontline states. I had been often in Angola, the war's epicentre where US funding, logistics, and propaganda were critical to the South African military offensives aimed at regime change and the defeat of the Cuban soldiers defending the MPLA government. Mugabe wanted to hear the real story from the ground, as whatever the outcome, it would shape the entire region's history.
The President was on one of his unproductive visits to Margaret Thatcher's Britain to ask for support against the death and devastation South Africa was causing across the region. It was not easy for him to ask for anything from Britain, so raw was the old wound of the colonialism which had shaped his life, but Zimbabwe, like its neighbours, was in real trouble then from South Africa.
Economic and political destabilisation were crippling the country and the region, and political assassinations of African National Congress members, commanders and cadres, in ANC camps and offices were terrorising every neighbouring country, while high profile assassinations were also taking place as far away as Western Europe. In Harare the ANC representative, Joe Gqabi, was killed outside his house in 1981, and the New Zealand born priest, and ANC member, Father Michael Lapsley, lost both hands to a letter bomb, shortly after the ANC had moved him from Lesotho because of direct threats against him, and many ANC cadres being killed.
A year or so later Mugabe's Zimbabwe took the considerable risk of hosting a conference of South African children who had been detained and tortured by the apartheid regime, and for the occasion large numbers of ANC leaders in exile came to Harare to meet for the first time lawyers, churchmen and township leaders from South Africa. And it was in Harare that President Fidel Castro made his defiant key speech that he would keep Cuban soldiers in Angola until the end of apartheid. These things fired the courage of the South African resistance, and explain why today's Mugabe is still a hero in South Africa despite the catastrophic collapse of the economy, crude repression, and the flight of thousands of Zimbabweans into South Africa.
Grace's Breakfast, like the Sunday Times' article, has Mugabe haunted by the spirit of the charismatic Josiah Tongogara, military leader of the ZANLA guerrilla army.
CIA briefings said Tongogara was killed by his own side because he was a rival to Mugabe. Ian Smith's later memoirs told the same tale. To chose to believe that Western version was a political choice in the Cold War climate of 25 years ago, but it is an inexcusable version of history to maintain it today when everyone who has made even a superficial study of the event, knows that the car crash was a tragic accident. As a device in the play it allows the bullying white psychiatrist to pronounce that guilt over the death of Tongogara and the idealism he represented, is at the root of Mugabe's anxiety attacks.
In a handy twist for the drama, Grace's psychiatrist is also a tobacco farmer, improbably married to a former guerrilla. Truth telling to the president brings him his comeuppance of course, and it is a broken bloodied man who sits in his farm with his own ghost, and watches a sprightly Mrs Mugabe look it over and decide it will be just right for one of her nieces. In a casual aside she tells him she'll meet him to discuss it later, in the Gynaecology department of the hospital, ‘There are some places where even the CIO wont follow.’
Political theatre is fashionable in Britain these days, there have been important plays at the National Theatre by David Hare, on the war in Iraq, and the state of the railways, for instance, and there have been a series of plays at the Tricycle Theatre made from edited transcripts of official enquiries. All these, like the American play, The Exonerated, using the words of men and women wrongly held on death row for years, have a serious political purpose, and are effective because they tell a truth which the powerful would like to remain hidden.
Power corrupts, we know, though we can never be reminded too often. The complex story of Zimbabwe's tragic recent history is not the story of one man, and Zimbabwe's own writers will tell it truthfully one day.
Victoria Brittain is the author of Hidden Lives, Hidden Deaths, South Africa's Crippling of a Continent, and Death of Dignity, Angola's Civil War. Most recently she was co-author with Moazzam Begg of Enemy Combatant, his account of his years in the US prisons of Kandahar, Bagram and Guantanamo. A version of this article appeared in The Guardian.
Challenging Hegemony: Social Movements and the Quest for a New Humanism in Post-Apartheid South Africa
By Nigel C. Gibson (ed.), Africa World Press: Trenton, NJ, 2006. Reviewed by Carl Death.
Challenging Hegemony is an account of the new social movements that have emerged in South Africa over the past few years in response to what many (including the authors in this edited collection) have seen as the ‘selling out’ of the ANC government to neo-liberal economics and authoritarian politics. The overall style of the collection combines academic analysis with deeply felt and often impassioned critiques of the ANC, in a way which is both reminiscent of, and often draws upon, the searing style of Frantz Fanon.
The chapters move from Nigel Gibson's wide-ranging introduction, and Michael Neocosmos' philosophical attack on the liberal State as inherently authoritarian, through empirically-driven chapters on Johannesburg's social movements, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the National Land Committee by Patrick Bond, Mandisa Mbali and Andile Mngxitama respectively. The final two chapters critically question the roles of class and organised labour (Franco Barchiesi), and global linkages (Richard Pithouse), for South Africa's new social movements.
Gibson begins his introductory essay by asserting that ‘it has been more than a decade since the end of apartheid and the larger promise of creating a ‘new’ South Africa is growing threadbare’ (p. 2), and this is a repeated theme of the collection. Accusations of co-option and broken promises are variously levelled at the ANC, civil society and the established Left, and much is made of the difference between bourgeois, bureaucratic NGOs and the vibrant, radical, grass-roots social movements. This comes across most strongly in Mngxitama's account of the National Land Committee between 1994 and 2004. He argues convincingly that the ‘fundamental transformation of South Africa can only occur if the land question is addressed’ (p. 161), and notes that as of 2004 only 3% of land had been redistributed to black South Africans, whereas the ANC's original target had been 30% after five years (p. 158).
Having established the importance of the land question, Mngxitama proceeds to offer a detailed organisational history of the National Land Committee (NLC) in the post-Apartheid period, and the growing divides within the NGO over the issue of land occupations, a question which split members into those willing to work with the ANC government and those prepared to openly oppose it. These issues reached crisis point with the emergence of the Landless People's Movement in 2001, and represents (for Mngxitama) a clear example of the struggle between the NGO form and the social movement form. Because of its decision to collaborate with and lobby the state, Mngxitama argues that the NLC cannot solve the land problems which provide its raison d'etre. His conclusion, although carefully qualified, is that the job of an NGO is to work itself out of a job, and ultimately that ‘the NGO form must cease to exist’ (p. 193).
This concern with the ‘NGO-ization’ of resistance (Gibson, p. 21) is prominent in many of the chapters, although as Pithouse notes, the simplistic distinction between ‘bad NGOs’ and ‘good social movements’ is one that must be avoided (p. 256). There are moments howeverwhere some of the contributors slip into this easy characterization. It is somewhat frustrating therefore that one of the most apparently interesting and complex case studies is dealt with relatively briefly in Gibson's introduction. He notes that the Bisasar Road landfill in Durban is championed as a carbon-trading project, whilst being opposed by nearby home-owners and Kyoto-sceptical environmentalists. The dump is however necessary for the everyday survival of those in the nearby informal settlements. Thus the World Bank emerges as the surprise defenders of the very poorest, whilst residents and environmentalists are accused of not consulting with those who depend upon the dump for their survival (Gibson, pp. 12 – 15). The close focus on organisational politics in this collection sometimes means that broader issues of transformation and long-term changes are not easily captured, and the NGO/social movement dichotomy that some of these essays risk falling into can obscure the fact that both NGOs and social movements are often working towards similar goals, especially when considered with a wider political lens.
Whilst the politics of the new social movements and the shortcomings of the established political system are dealt with by all the contributors persuasively and convincingly, there is occasionally ground for concern that some situations may be rather more complicated than is suggested. Is the ANC really just ‘the local agent of global capital’ (Pithouse, p. 248)? We are given few clues as to why the ANC, one-time heroes of resistance, have become apparently so fully and quickly co-opted into the neo-liberal hegemony. What is the ‘new humanism’ of the title, beyond Fanon's assurance that the poor don't search for the truth, rather ‘they are the truth’ (Gibson, p. 12)? Gibson is reluctant to provide answers (beyond what he describes as basic human rights) since it must be ‘collectively and self-consciously envisioned and articulated as the future-in-the-present’ (p. 35).
Nigel Gibson deserves credit for editing a collection of essays that complement, interact with and reinforce each other. There is a common tone of frustration and anger with the failure of liberal politics to deal with the problems of poverty, inequality, race and land. These are important concerns, and this collection develops and theorises many of the (increasingly familiar) arguments of activists and academics such as Ashwin Desai and Trevor Ngwane. Whilst it sometimes presents a rather one-sided or uneven picture of contemporary South African politics, these essays together do constitute a very forceful, stimulating and coherent book.