Reading reports on the agreement signed by Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai in Harare, Zimbabwe yesterday is double disappointing. Firstly, because the "solution" as announced has all the earmarks of being a sham. And that's because the opposition in Zimbabwe will likely have no power.
And, that's entirely apart from reporting done by Africa Confidential that Mugabe and his henchmen are stashing tens of millions of US Dollars in offshore accounts.
But this story is much, much sadder on a larger scale -- both in human and historical terms.
Two books I've read recently are Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa
and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, both memoirs by Peter Godwin. He grew up in the former Rhodesia and, while I guess you could say he tells his story from a White African point of view, he strives to be fair and freely and without hesitation writes of failures he saw in the former rule under Ian Smith. In fact, Godwin's family believed in majority rule, though most whites in the country overwhelmingly didn't. At least not for much too long.
Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa starts around 1964, with some of his earliest memories and talks of growing up in Rhodesia, his serving in a para-military police unit during the Rhodesian War, and his role in the new Zimbabwe -- when as a news reporter he helped uncover Mugabe's genocide against the Matabele tribe. Comrade Bob had formed a special military unit, trained by North Korea, that murdered as many as 20,000 men, women and children. Mukiwa goes up to the early 1980s and was published in the mid-1990s.
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa was written a couple of years ago, and covers events in Zimbabwe up to that point. The book also deals with his father slowly dying, and offers up some discoveries about his own heritage that I won't spoil for you. Godwin's parents emigrated to then-Rhodesia from Britain after World War II. That they love the place, and the people, is attested to by the fact they've stayed there through thick and thin. At the book's end, his mom is staying. It's a moving story.
The main feeling I take away from reading these books, especially with recent news from the place, is that Mugabe's rule has been a tragedy. And tragedy is such an overused word. Majority rule had to come, and should have come. Yet, with 1980 being the height of the Cold War, seeing a pro-Communist like Mugabe taking the reigns of power planted the seeds of failure. His ideology and corruption proved to be a Molotov cocktail blowing up the economy.
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