Zimbabwe: The Past Is the Future (review)

This impressive volume brings together the views of influential Zimbabwean intellectuals as well as less well-known Zimbabwean voices to offer an important and much needed insiders' assessment of the current crisis. Moving beyond the single causation of President Robert Mugabe, the chapters, all written by different authors, offer reflective and scholarly interpretations of recent events through the lens of the post-Independence period. A common aim is to clarify how the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), co-opted some elements and violently repressed others of the popular coalition that had been forged against it from the late 1980s. Six chapters are concerned with locating the historical roots of this conflict in the following areas: trade unions and labor (Brian Raftopoulos and Godfrey Kanyenze); liberation war veterans' opposition (The Zimbabwe Liberator's Platform, Duduzile Tafara); and oppositional politics (David Kaulemu, Eldred Masunungure). Eight chapters document and analyze the tragic results of the current crisis in the following areas: the environment and rural livelihoods (Emmanuel Manzungu); land reform and farm workers (Lloyd M. Sachikonye); the courts, democracy, and rule of law (Geoffrey Feltoe, Dieter Sholz); human rights (A. P. Reeler), and within the "religio-cultural landscape" (Paul Gundani).

The editor, David Harold-Barry, a Jesuit with many years experience in Zimbabwe, expresses the frustrations shared by many of the contributors over the return to a closed political debate. The authors here have not given up on the dream of a more inclusive political climate; they are, however, hard-pressed to see a way forward in order to revive democratic potentials. As Raftopolous and Kaulemu point out, the nation has lost its ability to imagine an alternative. Kaulemu, for example, criticizes the ruling party's myopic view of "the 'inner core' of Zimbabwean nationalism as Shona historical experience," but he also notes critically that this is a view that the opposition party, the movement for Democratic Change (MDC), "appears to share" as well (83).

The land and labor questions are perhaps the most important issues left unresolved by the ruling party in the first twenty years of rule since independence in 1980, and they therefore receive careful attention in this volume. Kanyenze provides a very detailed narrative of how the labor movement became the backbone of opposition politics by the late 1990s. He shows quite effectively the growing confrontation between the ruling party and labor, and the resulting absence of a political middle ground to help restructure the economy. Two groups who have been marginalized by the crisis have been farmworkers, whose predicament Lloyd Sachikonye describes, and those war veterans who refused to go along with the ruling party's tactics in the farm invasions, represented in this collection by the Zimbabwe Liberator's Platform. An interesting short chapter by Alexander Kanengoni, a veteran, gives his personal account of the emotional release and "closure" he experienced after receiving land through the Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP). The other chapters on the land issue, however, show that although the authors are not opposed to land redistribution, they do object to the hypocritical way the FTLRP has been carried out to serve the ruling party's interests. Emmanuel Manzungu's chapter on the environmental impact of the FTLRP reveals the frustration among Zimbabwean experts over how quickly the FTLRP and economic and political failures have destroyed years of progress in areas of water and resource management. He relates how the crisis is creating major health and environmental catastrophes as rural and urban water systems, animal management projects, and the country's biodiversity are all at risk.

Generation is a central theme running through the chapters. Kaulemu claims that the current national politics have failed both the old and the young. This observation is confirmed quite tellingly in Paul Gundani's chapter, "The Zimbabwean Religio-cultural Landscape in the Era of HIV/AIDS." Gundani shows how...