Searching for a Common Idiom Among African
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxiv:4 (Spring, 2004), 595–599. AFRICAN TEXTS Robert I. Rotberg Searching for a Common Idiom among African Texts President Robert Gabriel Mugabe is remarkable for hav- ing transformed a well-managed, thriving, promising southern African country into a failed state—all within the last six years. In 2003, inºation in once wealthy Zimbabwe was racing along at 500 percent; staples and fuel were in short supply; unemployment reached 80 percent; hospitals barely functioned; and schools were without textbooks and teachers. Mugabe, a latter-day despot, had rigged a re-election in 2002, attacked civil society, killed and maimed opponents, suspended the rule of law, and thumbed his nose at President Bush and other foreign and local critics. In 2003, Mugabe had been a dominating prime minister and president for twenty-three years. Yet, before Zimbabwe’s inde- pendence in 1980, Mugabe had not always been the key ªgure in his people’s struggle against white-settler rule. Indeed, had one of his better-known competitors taken power, Zimbabweans could have avoided the home-grown tyranny under which they now chafe. First came Joshua Nkomo, but his easy-going and compro- mising ways led to a fratricidal battle; Ndabaningi Sithole, Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo, and Mugabe emerged from it as the leaders of a Shona-speaking nationalist movement called the Zimbabwe Af- rican National Union (zanu). Nkomo thereafter (from 1963) led the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (zapu). zanu was backed by China and zapu by the Soviet Union. Sithole and Mugabe were jailed for almost ten years, to late 1974, by the internationally illegal white-settler government of Rhodesia, which usurped power in 1965.
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