War veterans in Zimbabwe's revolution: challenging neo-colonialism and settler and international capital, by Zvakanyorwa Wilbert Sadomba, Harare, Weaver Press; Woodbridge, James Currey, xii + 247 pp., £40.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781847010254
Catastrophe: what went wrong in Zimbabwe? by Richard Bourne, London, Zed Books, 2011, xvii + 302 pp., £14.99 (paperback), ISBN 9781848135215
A predictable tragedy: Robert Mugabe and the collapse of Zimbabwe, by Daniel Compagnon, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010, 344 pp., £26.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780812242676
What is the cause of the problems in Zimbabwe? For Daniel Compagnon it is one man – Robert Mugabe. For Richard Bourne it is history – 75 years of white violence and land grabs. For Zvakanyorwa Sadomba it was the failure of the ZANU leadership to make the changes that had been promised during the liberation war.
All three books are detailed and seriously researched, yet they paint dramatically different pictures, showing how much presentation and choice of evidence is shaped by the authors' own perspectives and the media image of Zimbabwe. Thus, for Compagnon, Zimbabwe is a ‘tragedy’ and Mugabe is its author. So the political scientist concentrates on the rise of one man, and details the sins of President Mugabe, but we learn little of the people of Zimbabwe and other political forces. He also sees ZANU-PF as monolithic, using phrases like ‘alleged moderates’ in the party (p. 169). For Bourne, ‘that there was and is a Mugabe factor in the catastrophe of modern Zimbabwe is undeniable, but as an explanation of what has gone wrong is not only simplistic and inadequate, but misleading’ (p. 236). Most of his book looks at history and he does an excellent job in showing how white violence going back to the arrival of Cecil Rhodes in the 1880s created a culture of violence where powerful people take what they want. The result is ‘the cataclysm which engulfs Zimbabwe in the first decade of the twenty-first century’ (p. 132).
Both authors have been partly overtaken by events, as they wrote their books during the disastrous 2004–8 hyperinflation. Thus they largely miss the remarkable economic transformation which occurred after Zimbabwe adopted the US dollar as currency in 2009, as well as the relative stability brought by the unity government. By 2011, it did not feel like a tragedy, cataclysm, or catastrophe any longer, even if many of the problems had not gone away.
Compagnon and Bourne are outsiders while Sadomba is an academic and former guerrilla who details the wide range of internal forces, and, in particular, the struggle of guerrillas with the party elite during and after the war. Compagnon treats Zimbabwe largely in isolation and does not look at how Zimbabwe interacted with the wider world in an era of globalisation, and ignores structural adjustment. Bourne accepts as ‘one of the roots’ of the problem the adoption of IMF and World Bank adjustment policy in the 1990s which brought economic decline and massive unemployment, and ‘was profoundly destructive’. Although the 1990s were very hard on the black majority, Compagnon and Bourne both note that white farmers continued to do very well. Sadomba situates the crisis in the ZANU leadership's desperate and increasingly unsuccessful attempt to maintain white commercial farming in the face of growing hardship of peasants and workers as industries closed and agricultural support and credit was cut back.
All three authors agree that the president has too much power and that he and his team made poor decisions. Bourne notes that the politburo and government were ‘light on economic expertise’ (p. 132). This caused many of the subsequent problems, as there was no coherent plan to reverse the damage inflicted by adjustment. Hyperinflation was caused largely by a decision to print money and inflate out of the 1990s crisis, and various attempts to impose price controls only made matters worse.
Sadomba's insider analysis of the growing divisions within Zimbabwe cannot be matched by the two outsiders. He stresses the growing divisions between the war veterans and the ZANU elite, which they saw as being in alliance with white farmers. This led to a dramatic meeting between government ministers and land occupiers on 6 November 1998 in which, Sadomba says, ‘war veterans officially announced that they had become the vanguard of the land occupations and that they were going to lead the masses in confronting ZANU-PF elites, “the new ZANU-PF of your own is full of the rich, the bourgeoisie”. They were also attacking the state and President Mugabe’ (p. 132). ‘A sense of betrayal is deep-seated in the war veterans today’, he continues, with the ZANU-PF ruling elite trying to split the war veterans off from the rest of society ‘to ensure that there is not effective criticism or opposition which is grounded on the ethos and objectives of the liberation struggle’ (p. 106).
The strikingly different perspectives of the books are shown by their different views of people mentioned. Dr Chenjerai Hunzvi was an important leader of the war veterans who was also problematic and who probably stole money intended for veterans. But where Compagnon says he issued people with ‘dubious’ disability certificates to allow them to claim improper pensions (p. 66), Sadomba says that original assessments, often by white Rhodesian doctors, were ‘grossly flawed’ and significantly underestimated the degree of disability, and that Hunzvi corrected these assessments (p. 100).
Roger Boka was a millionaire businessman who in 1997 set up the first black-owned tobacco auction floor, breaking the white monopoly. Compagnon dismisses Boka as ‘a vocal member of the indigenization lobby close to the ZANU-PF hierarchy’ who backed evictions of whites from their farms and ‘enjoyed behind-the-scenes political backing’ (p. 169). Sadomba calls him ‘undoubtedly the most innovative and successful black businessman’, and notes that ‘the roots of Boka … were certainly not in ZANU-PF’ and that while others acquired their business empires through links with the party, Boka built his through hard work, and was opposed by ‘ZANU-PF stalwarts’. Boka was ‘a pioneer in a white-dominated field’ who told a newspaper interviewer ‘I tried to come in through the door but they [the whites] wouldn't let me in. I tried the window but it was closed, so I crashed through the roof’ (pp. 163–164).
Land reform is central to any story of the country. Bourne details the way land was given to whites as an incentive to participate in occupations and wars, or as a reward. Bourne and Sadomba both point to the way white World War II veterans were given land – after black farmers had been cleared off. Sadomba then points out that veterans of the liberation war were simply expecting the same reward.
The fast-track land reform and land occupations of 2000 remain controversial. Compagnon simply dismisses land reform as a ‘charade’. Bourne writes of ‘visitors to Zimbabwe and outside journalists who smuggled out footage … saw people begging by the roadside…. Not many of the ZANU-PF elite, who had been given farms in return for the loyalty, were seriously interested in farming’ (p. 214).
Bourne talks of ‘formerly fertile land returned to bush’ (p. 214), but recent research shows that resettlement farmers are now using more of the land than had been used by the white farmers. Even the white Commercial Farmers Union admits agricultural production is back to the 1990s average. And the ZANU-PF elite is farming its land. Similarly, Bourne notes, correctly, that the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) ‘barely operated in 2008'. But when we were there in 2010 and 2011, the UZ campus in Harare had returned to its former vibrancy, and much of the new research on land reform is being done by UZ PhD and MSc students.
Zimbabwe's very rapid recovery since 2009 is a challenge to anyone who sees only cataclysm and tragedy. Zimbabwe remains poor and the ZANU-PF elite is being kept in check by a still fragile unity government. But dollarisation and the unity government have created a space in which Zimbabweans are using their new land and transforming their country – temporarily, at least, making squabbling politicians less relevant.