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Robert Mugabe, another too-long-serving African ruler: a review essay.

Article Excerpt
Africa's roster of long-serving rulers is extensive.(1) Seventy-nine year old Robert Gabriel Mugabe's twenty-two-year rule in Zimbabwe assures him a place on the list. Mugabe, like many other durable African leaders, has been associated with large-scale violence against opponents, which has contributed to the population's impoverishment. On these basics, the authors of the three books under review agree. (2)

Robert Mugabe became caught up in African nationalist politics in white-ruled Rhodesia on a visit home from independent Ghana, where he had been teaching. In 1963, the nationalist movement split. Joshua Nkomo continued to lead the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), while Ndabiningi Sithole led the breakaway Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) with Mugabe as secretary-general. Opposed to racial equality, Prime Minister Ian Smith locked up leading nationalists, including Mugabe, in 1964 and declared independence from Britain in 1965 to be rid of its pressures. ZANU, recruiting chiefly from the Shona majority, and ZAPU from the dominant Ndebele ethnic minority in Matabeleland, had already established guerrilla armies in Zambia. In 1974, Smith came under regional pressures to negotiate a settlement and to release the men he had jailed. The negotiations failed. Mugabe soon escaped to Mozambique, then the main base for ZANU's rapidly growing army. By 1977, Mugabe had established himself as ZANU's leader. He favored a military victory but became a reluctant signatory of a British-supervised negotiated settlement in 1979.

In the 1980 election, Mugabe's party, renamed ZANU(PF), won a parliamentary majority and Mugabe became prime minister. The Marxist-Leninist who had promised to confiscate white land and hold war crimes trials called for reconciliation. He guaranteed white farmers that they had nothing to fear, he reappointed the heads of the Central Intelligence Organization, the police, and the army; and he appointed ZAPU leaders and whites to his cabinet. Mugabe won praise and international donor money. But he soon manifested his penchant for violence to attain total power.

His first victim was his old rival, ZAPU. After independence, a small group of insurgents, former members of ZAPU's guerrilla army, attacked civilians and state development projects, chiefly in Matabeleland. Beginning in 1983, the government sent in thousands of troops, who killed 6,000 to 20,000 civilians and tortured, beat, and brutalized many others. In 1987, the violence ended with the absorption of ZAPU into ZANU(PF). Mugabe had accomplished a de facto one-party state, a longstanding objective. A few days later a constitutional amendment made Mugabe president.

Between 1988 and 1999, the main issues were Mugabe's authoritarianism and economic mismanagement. In 1991, Mugabe adopted, at least in part, the International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment medicine. Workers were retrenched, and real wages continued to decline yet Mugabe's corrupt cronies prospered. Mugabe used state machinery to repress nonthreatening opponents: university students; a new party formed by his ex-colleague, Edgar Tekere; journalists; and workers, who became...