In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

10 A Plundering Tiger with Its Deadly Cubs? The USSR and China as Weapons in the Engineering of a “Zimbabwean Nation,” 1945–2009 Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga Does it make sense to talk about the “Cold War,” let alone “The Global Cold War,” in the Global South? What happens to local time when “watershed moments” in the Global North are extended uncritically to mark global time? Are we sure that the materiality and meaning of these “local” events are shared beyond their borders? How do other locals measure their own times? Like “the First World War” and “the Second World War,” “the Cold War” falls within a continuing way of defining what counts as worldly (what is globally significant) from Europe and North America, using war as if it is the only marker of time. The rivalry between two countries— the United States and the Soviet Union—and the trickery they deploy to outwit one another, and using other countries as unobvious weaponry, is transformed into a universal moment in which everybody is living.1 On occasion Cuba is mentioned, if only as a Soviet surrogate and base-plate position for Moscow’s nuclear warheads.2 China enters the fray as a Soviet ally—until it gets fed up with Moscow’s duplicity when striking nocturnal deals with Washington.3 In the end, whenever scholars insist on “the Cold War” in the Global South, their defense is no more than following the North’s footsteps and pathways in the Global South. Of late, even scholars of such oft-omitted “Cold Warriors” as Cuba, China, and the Nordic countries have followed suit.4 Any apportionment of agency to African players becomes no more than a work of charity in which the Africans can do no more than respond as opposed to initiating events and synchronizing the North to their own time and circumstances. So what are the modalities of inverting the commonplace synchronization of Southern time to Northern time into a synchronization of Northern time to Southern time? As this essay will proceed to show, it would force us to spin the narrative of American and Soviet users of Southern puppets into one of Southerners as designers (or political engineers) of post-colonial 232 Mavhunga futures using the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and influential Southerners Cuba and China as unobvious weaponries (armories as well as strategic assets) to achieve their objectives. Thanks to emerging memoirs of Soviet operatives in Africa during the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s, we now know that the Soviets did not even use the term “Cold War,” whether prefixed with “the” or “a.” The Soviets considered such vocabulary “the creation of ‘war mongers’ and ‘imperialist propaganda.’” From Moscow, the battle was not between “two ‘superpowers ’ assisted by their ‘satellites’ and ‘proxies’” as depicted from Washington but “a united fight of the world’s progressive forces against imperialism.”5 Official America had borrowed the term from the English novelist-journalist George Orwell, who in 1945 had deployed it to deride how atomic power had equipped the US and the USSR with a bully-boy mentality of dividing and ruling the world between themselves.6 Of course, Orwell’s anger toward hegemonic forces and their powers of permeation blinded him to the very same permeation as an avenue for local resistance against or even manipulation of the hegemonic, or, as James Ferguson recently showed, the likelihood of such seemingly universalizing forces to anchor in some while completely steering clear of other places.7 It could very well be that the North viewed the period as one of a nuclear arms race while the South viewed it as an anti-colonial and postcolonial era.8 The question at stake in this chapter is this: Does the Cold War conceptually and analytically belong in the South, and if so, on whose terms? The Norwegian scholar Odd Arne Westad rejects the position that it does not, on two grounds. First, “without the Cold War, Africa, Asia, and possibly also Latin America would have been very different regions today.” Second, “Third World elites often framed their own political agendas in conscious response to the models of development presented by the two main contenders of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union” [emphasis added].9 In making his powerful argument, Westad is writing against traditional diplomatic historians for whom the Cold War is only about superpowers and their shenanigans. Whereas Westad makes a case for the inclusion of the South...

Share