HEIDI HOLLAND

Love, hate, Mugabe and Britain

The stiff upper lip the Zimbabwean leader acquired in his pursuit of all things British is fuelling his unstoppable rage

 

Beneath the steady gaze of a bronzed David Livingstone, I felt privileged to discuss one of colonialism’s most confusing legacies with an audience of 500 at London’s awesomely historic Royal Geographical Society last week.
Titled The Britishness of Mugabe, my talk was by chance well-timed since a European Union delegation had just visited Mugabe in Harare – the first time the West had engaged with him in seven years. While clearly delighted to be back in the international fold, Mugabe immediately declared that his quarrel was not with the West but with Britain – a position he will hold until he dies (bearing in mind his mother lived to be 100 and he’s only 85).
In explaining to my English audience that Robert Mugabe’s publicly declared hatred of Britain conceals a deep love for the British, I began by exploring the extent to which Zimbabwe’s president, like most of us colonials, grew up emulating the former colonial power in the belief that excellence resided in our British rather than our African identity.
This is why Robert Mugabe made a fetish of loving cricket, the quintessentially English game; dressed all his life in austere suits like the stereotypical English gentleman; polished up his vowels self-consciously and even developed something of a British sense of humour.  As his arch-rival Morgan Tsvangirai will attest, Zimbabwe’s affairs of state are invariably discussed with the president over a cup of tea, always an important part of the Englishman’s daily ritual.
I recalled being handed tea in an exquisite English porcelain cup by a waiter in white gloves and tails while waiting at State House to interview Mugabe at the end of 2007. Instead of offering me the cucumber sandwiches that would have completed the colonial picture, however, he plonked a bread bun and a pork sausage on a matching gold-rimmed side plate.
Every man in Mugabe’s official space was wearing a dark suit, sober tie and matching handkerchief, a uniform dating back to the Zimbabwe premier’s first cabinet meeting in 1980 when those among Zanu-PF’s hierarchy who had turned up in Mao jackets, Hawaiian shirts and camouflage kit were told by their soft-spoken leader, “If you want to be cabinet ministers, I expect you to dress like cabinet ministers”. They were to look as if they ruled from Westminster, in other words.
One aspect of Mugabe’s Britishness (he had an Anglo/Irish surrogate father) that did him a lot of harm psychologically is the stiff-upper-lip that is so much a part of the English character. When he came out of prison after being locked away for 11 years for his political beliefs, he had accumulated six of his seven university degrees while sitting behind bars – which tells you how much of his time he spent with his nose in a book rather than coming to terms with what was happening to him emotionally (as opposed to Mandela, who spent his time talking and talking and talking).
Mugabe insisted on his release that he was not bitter. He’d describe those lost years as a power battleground, “a battle of wits and strategy”. But his only child died while he was in prison, and he was denied permission to attend the three-year-old’s funeral. So he had to be bitter: any man would be in response to such cruelty. It is his essentially British denial of his true feelings over the years that has caused the unstoppable rage we see in him today.
Once the former colonial power had betrayed him, as he saw it, on the land issue during the late Nineties, those pent-up feelings of injustice came spewing out of his every pore.
After all, like most Zimbabweans of his generation, Mugabe had personal experience of his own relatives having been forcibly removed from their land by Cecil Rhodes in the 1890s. Stories of Britain’s land grab are still passed down in the oral African tradition.
What most revealed Mugabe’s fragmented identity to me, though, were the tears glistening in his eyes when he talked about Britain’s Royals. The Queen and her four children, her sister and her mother had all stayed with him at State House, he told me. “And now, to this day, we treasure those moments, and we have nothing against the Royal Family,” he continued - using the Royal We.
It was Mugabe’s distress on discussing the Queen that made me realize why his dispute with the British has the peculiar intensity of a family quarrel. But, as I explained to an audience that included prominent English diplomats, industrialists and journalists, their own unresolved colonial feelings have also fuelled Mugabe’s battle with Britain.
For instance, a Harare-based British ambassador called Longworth felt so free to express his personal antipathy towards the former colony’s president at a crucially sensitive time in Anglo/Zimbabwean relations that Mugabe began referring to him as Longbottom, even on public radio. Another inappropriately enraged British ambassador placed an advertisement in a local newspaper on the day Zimbabwe’s unity government deal was signed, insisting that Britain would never recognize an administration headed by Mugabe.
I concluded the talk with my belief that the fateful land dispute between Mugabe and Tony Blair need not have gone so horribly wrong. Britain’s historical role in Zimbabwe was (dare we say) parental, which ought to have enabled its government to be the responsible adult in an escalating head-to-head that was clearly going to end very badly.
Considering Blair’s well-remembered perseverance in resolving the intractable Northern Ireland problem, Britain’s simultaneously clumsy handling of the Zimbabwe crisis with a tricky, narcissistic man like Robert Mugabe has never quite added up for me, unless explained by post-colonial toxicity on both sides.
A member of the audience who took me aside in the elegantly embossed Victorian foyer afterwards said that people living in Britain over the past decade had been informed mainly by their right-wing media’s relentless vilification of Mugabe at the expense of more nuanced versions of Zimbabwe’s history - and they would therefore struggle to believe that Britain could have exercised a positive influence over the tragedy that is still unfolding.

Britain’s ambassador to South Africa at the time of Mugabe’s land grab also approached me outside the lecture theatre after the talk to say that she (no longer working for the British Foreign Office) wished in retrospect that Blair had resisted entreaties from confrontational colleagues like Clare Short and met directly with Mugabe in the tense days following the first land invasions of 2000. Intuitive Blair may have realized face-to-face that Mugabe could be persuaded to cooperate, she ventured.
Ironically, Blair may get another chance to engage with Mugabe, assuming he becomes the first president of Europe, as seems likely. But even if he has the political courage to charm the proverbial pants off Zimbabwe’s despised leader, Mugabe will carry on craving Britain’s acceptance.