Searching for a Common Idiom among African Texts

President Robert Gabriel Mugabe is remarkable for having transformed a well-managed, thriving, promising southern African country into a failed state—all within the last six years. In 2003, inflation in once wealthy Zimbabwe was racing along at 500percent; 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 independence in 1980, Mugabe had not always been the key figure 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 compromising 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 African 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. Meanwhile Chitepo, of the Manyika branch of the Shona, from eastern Zimbabwe, headed the war council of ZANU, based in neighboring Zambia. Chitepo was a polished, urbane, liberal lawyer, educated at Fort Hare College in South Africa and later at the Inns of Court in London. In 1954, he returned home to become Zimbabwe's first African barrister. Ten years later, after the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland collapsed and ZAPU and ZANU split, he became national chairman of ZANU. In 1966, when ZANU began planning aguerrilla war from bases outside Zimbabwe, Chitepo assumed the leadership of that external effort. By the mid-1970s, Rhodesia was under serious attack by ZANU irregulars; even the cities felt threatened.

But all was not well among the guerrillas. ZAPU and ZANU were bitter rivals; ZANU itself was rife with factional competition, especially between military cohorts loyal to Chitepo, Josiah Tongogara, Solomon Mujuru (Rex Nhongo), and many others. Soviet-style purges were not uncommon, and kangaroo courts dispensed justice. Although some of the rivalries may increasingly have flowed along ethnic lines, White is unwilling to credit the importance of an emerging ethnic consciousness within the ranks of ZANU's freedom-fighting Shona speakers. She also slights the relevance of networks that were based on notions of extended kinship. Yet, Chitepo's origin as a Manyika, not a Zezeru or a Karanga, became a point of contention, notwithstanding the common language of Shona (with subtle linguistic differences).

Given the intense intra-ZANU competition for primacy, funding, and political and military direction, it is no wonder that Chitepo had enemies. Everyone in the movement did, and even in the absence of outstanding suspicions and jealousies, the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organization was more than capable of provoking rumor and division among its enemies. Spies and collaborators had infiltrated both Zimbabwean liberation armies. Spreading disinformation was among the more accomplished Rhodesian counter-terror specialties.

Chitepo, who might otherwise have led Zimbabwe to independence, was blown up by a car bomb early one morning in March 1975. Among the immediate suspects were other ZANU militants, Zambians loyal to President Kenneth Kaunda, and several special operatives of Rhodesia. Kaunda's government jailed many of the key ZANU figures in Zambia; Mozambique blamed Tongogara. Eventually, the official Zambian inquiry that White analyzes exhaustively began. A host of variably plausible confessions by ZANU operatives ensued, but the most detailed confession came a decade later from white spies sent...