Re-living the Second Chimurenga: Memories from the Liberation Struggle in Zimbabwe, and: What Happens after Mugabe? (review)

When I sat down to read these two books I had some ideas of what to expect. Fay Chung is a courageous, long-time ZANU loyalist, respected for her sensible and largely behind-the-scenes contributions to the struggle and to the development of the educational structure in independent Zimbabwe. She has spent nearly a lifetime making sacrifices for the benefit of less fortunate members of her society. Political? You bet. But not in the sense that she has had a personal ambition to gain acclaim or power. Chiefly she is known as a do-er in the finest sense of that word. Geoff Hill is a white Zimbabwean, now based in South Africa. He is currently the African correspondent for TheWashington Times, a right-leaning daily, and his work tends to be quoted appreciatively by various conservative (but not radically rightist) bloggers and think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and frontpagemag.com. I was thinking that his book might be a screed against all things African. I was wrong, for I find that each of these books has a good deal to commend it, albeit for different reasons.

The Chung memoir is useful for her insights about the struggle and the various personalities involved. She begins by telling about growing up in colonial Rhodesia, her education and the beginnings of her politicization at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. She began her professional life teaching, fled to Britain, and made her way back via Zambia, where in 1973 she joined ZANU. Her comments on the competition between ZANU and ZAPU, and the internal and sometimes ruthless conflicts within the party and its army, are revealing and disheartening. The Ian Smith regime did its best to infiltrate the Zimbabwe nationalists and, by favoring some of the movements, to divide them. To some extent the Front Line States such as Zambia, Mozambique, and Tanzania, as well as London, Washington, and Pretoria also pressured ZANU to arrive at a détente with Smith. Chung's views about Sithole, Mugabe, Muzorewa, Josiah Tongogara, and many others are valuable as well. Add to that her close coverage of the Nhari Rebellion within ZANLA, the Vashandi group, and her particular take on the role of women in the movement and the place of traditional religious leaders in the military struggle and you have a rich source of information on this era. Overall, this is a useful addition to the record about the struggle.

She writes most completely about the establishment of a comprehensive and democratic educational system, recounting stories about students and teachers, but also about the undermining of that system by bureaucrats who never really accepted the ideology of education for all and the party hacks and local patronage-dependent pols who sought to profit personally from the government projects they were able to control or exploit. Although her prose is rambling, filled with digressions, and repetitious (she would have benefited from an assertive editor), she lays out a searing indictment of a corrupt, rapacious, insensitive, retrograde regime that has turned its back on popular democracy, on civil and political rights for its people, and on the admirable social agenda set out during the struggle. Even ZANU's signature policy initiative of the last decade, land reform and resettlement, has been imposed violently, illegally and with the result that political cronies of the people in power, not the landless and poor peasantry, have seized the most prized pieces of land.

In spite of her litany of grievances and her analysis that slices and dices the circle around Mugabe (especially his second wife), however, Chung inexplicably refuses to abandon her party. By taking this position, she compromises her criticisms of the ZANU government and she abandons the unfulfilled...